Non-stop noise

I have listened to non-stop noise all day today.

• Nora in the kitchen listening to a CD of something that sounds techno.
• Sara in the living room with the TV blasting cartoons.
• The playstation in the boy's room with that God awful vrooom, vroooom, vroooom of Driver.
• In the middle of all this is the doorbell ringing
• the phone ringing and the kids arguing.
• I'll go to work today and have noise there too.

I have very low tolerance for noise these days. It gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. How do you avoid noise when you have six kids, two cats, and what seems like a zillion parakeets? Not to mention the fact that the nephew from downstairs seems to live with us too?

Of course we are now on the summer schedule - no school for the kids and hot weather. People in Libya stay up very late in the summer. When the kids were smaller I would try to keep them on a schedule were they had to be in bed early, but now that they are mostly teenagers it doesn't seem to work. And also everything in Libya starts late. People arrive for weddings and other parties after 10pm and time stretches until the early hours of the morning.

I need a vacation - away from the kids, noise and nonsense of daily life. . . . That's hardly likely to happen . . . In the meantime, I will do my best and try to find a pair of earplugs that block out most of the noise.