Thursday is the day of the week I have “time off” from work. No clients, no phone calls about work and no work email. Generally. Funny though that Thursday seems to be the day that everyone from work want a piece of me, or calls or emails or gets back to me about something I enquired about on Monday.
Thursday is the day I have “time on” with kids, with the youngest two who don’t go to school. We go to Playgroup on Thursday mornings and it’s like a little magical space of cool mummies and kids who do all the same crazy stuff that mine do (or worse versions of it, like get up earlier and make me grateful that 6am isn’t 4.50am) and cups of tea and a tasty treat, and a chance to sing songs and have rituals stories and routines with my girls.
It took me ages to embrace Playgroup as a place to relax. This time (round 4!) I deliberately chose an earthy, alternative playgroup (which to be honest I always wanted to join but had serious misconceptions about being judged for not always eating whole foods and having girls who sometimes behaved liked princesses and spoke on occasion in American accents (from too much TV surely??)). But it’s not like that at all, and we’re all just the kind of mummy we are – and some recycle clothing, and lots are crafty and grow vegies and have chooks and eat whole foods – and the kids do their own thing – which includes taking toys of little kids, chucking a tantrum at story time, having snotty noses and preferring the cupcakes to the whole food choices – and sometimes the tasty treat has blue food colouring in it – OK, OK, so now I’m exaggerating, but you get the point! As mum’s sometimes I think we set ourselves up to not just relax and be who we are – and although I do like to channel my inner domestic goddess at times, I’m much more interesting (I think) when I’m telling a funny story about the reality of life with kids (like catching 2 year old at 4am in her bed with the iPad watching Monsters Inc – yes, this really happened – but she looked up at me with big eyes and handed it over pretty quick and lay back down and went to sleep – just quietly chuffed that she gotten at least 45 minutes through the movie before being busted!!). And it is fun, and relaxing, and I am a fan of Playgroup!
Today after Playgroup we came home and napped! OMG. How great is that thing called afternoon nap! I always wish that someone would sternly instruct me to go have a nap most afternoons, and not come out until I was nice again! Funny how kids just don’t have the same desire for it! I think it’s been a while now since I have managed to coordinate a 2 kids, 1 mummy nap, but it was a cracker…
And that’s about as wild as a day of Mummy gets. Especially one with a nap. These are the days I have nothing much to tell the man in my life when he asks “how was your day?”, and I think that must be a good thing. I’ve been honest before I’m sure and said I can’t do this every day, but also, to be even more honest, I’ve never tried. I wonder what it would be like?
And then, to top it all off, by the same motion that coordinated the afternoon nap, all off a sudden I was unexpectedly child free and my man came home and we WENT OUT TO DINNER. JUST THE TWO OF US. And then…well, we had a kid free house for laters….
Greatest day off EVER.
