Just airbrush me… please

How is it that newborns have the uncanny ability to suck the life out of their parents in the space of a few short weeks? I’m not complaining, not really, I just… well … ever since having children I seem to have aged a helluva lot.

The general consensus is: don’t do drugs and that hard drinking and partying completely f**k you up and when you’re over 40 your face will reflect the life you have lived. To be sure, I have lived a rather, er… shall we say full life. But I have not aged so much back then as I have in the past 3 years. 

The reason? No, my hard-drinking-partying-days are NOT catching up with me. Those past years feel, in fact, a good deal more sedate in terms of staying up late and wrecking the body than the rearing children ones. That lacrosse accident that I had in high school or that time when I partied all night with my friends, showered and then went to work for 8am in the morning have not caught up with me. You might think this is completely absurd but no! I tell you, these things are not ongoing sustained abuses of the body without the chance for respite and recuperation but that child-rearing is.

What I am trying to say is…

I used to be able to sleep in until 2pm if I wanted to and now I wake up at 6am (sometimes 5.30am) after I have been up and down during the night, as has my partner (er. ok, so NOT as much as my partner) and we do it cos we LOVE our kids but they are sapping all the collagen and vitamin young from our faces and, as a result I look like this:

What I am trying to say, is...

that I am getting OLD and WRINKLY and I have been seriously thinking about facial resurfacing for my skin and laser treatment for my rapidly diminishing eyesight  but I'm afraid that it will all go expensively and horribly horribly wrong and that I'll end up looking like this:

or perhaps even this:

(let’s just not even speak about my hearing cos we ALL know that Caroline is a COMPLETE DEAFHEAD).

wot? oh yeah.

I am popping vitamins like they are lollies and eating lollies like they are, well, lollies, and all in all my diet has gone to God as has my figure and so I am wearing those suck-in-underpant thingies that only OLD WOMEN wear

NO! not the sexy ones but more like, you know...

yes, more like that, but squishier and in black because I can't seem to consider wearing anything flesh-toned, although I am sure that will change (but only if I find some good ones at a reasonable price).