You know the day formerly known as Monday is still Monday when your printer ink finally runs out. When your internet data allowance is mysteriously halved. And when your teenage bear wakes up at 4am with a sore ear (a sore ear?!) and you spend the rest of the night plotting how to get her medicine without needing to see a doctor.

We woke up to school work too. Not that we don’t do school work, but this was four pieces of homework to be uploaded by midnight – 7pm our time.

Meanwhile, the teenage bear stayed asleep in her cave. I looked at our new teenage cub. We had to design an experiment looking at the difference between two different-sized parachutes. Study the air resistance between them. Homework wouldn’t take too long, I reasoned. Ahh. Monday morning hubris. 

Breakfast first. An hour later, the sink was full of dishes, dinghy was down and Jack set off to town.

I wiped my hands and looked at Delph. ‘Parachutes?’ 

We went with the plastic bag option. Not too bad. The larger parachute required a couple of attempts. We used sewing thread for the line and for the jumper: two identical Chelsea dolls.

Oh, the temporary excitement. We found the highest point to drop them from and began. Delph let go of the jumpers while I managed the stopwatch. I picked each jumper up, Delph untangled and we did it again. 

Jack called in. The pharmacy wouldn’t give him any medicine until Lulu saw the doctor. The doctor asked if she’d been exposed to Covid-19. It looked like she was going to need a test. Whoa, hold on a sec.

‘I’m going to try a different pharmacy,’ Jack said. ‘Plus there’s a tiny queue at Jordan’s so I’ll join it.’ Another fun Monday fact: both shopping days for our surname are closed this week. Two public holidays in Barbados. ‘Write me a list.’ 

As Delph opened Powerpoint, I rummaged through the fridge, phone in hand. 

Meanwhile, the bear was up, hungry. And with a sore ear. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up for school? Now I have to do the recordings. Urgghh!’

Two paracetamol, cup of hot tea in her hand. Monday wasn’t going to defeat us. 

After writing up the parachute experiment, Delph had quadrilateral angles to work through. Some of them downright tricky. Lu went through her lessons. Paused to eat a steaming pile of hash browns with grated cheese. Then she tackled biology. Plants and potometers. She re-checked her Chemistry homework. Added the states of matter.

Jack came back – with medicine. He’d told one pharmacy how much he disliked the other pharmacy. They’d laughed their socks off.

Meanwhile, the wind which had been screaming all day, suddenly disappeared. We went up and watched the sea surface turn into mercury. Lu put cotton wool in her ear and went to catch free wifi at the bow. Delph read her new book. Jack caught a small squirrel fish and let it go. We cheered up and found printer ink. Hopefully tomorrow was still Tuesday.