The weekend passed in a haze of hotness and and small jobs. I dunno, we’re finding it hard to make the most of weekends at the moment, which saddens me because recently we promised ourselves that the upshot of the end of difficult times would be that we would make sure we did better for the girls and somehow we are both finding it hard to be motivated to be actively doing things with them. I’d love our weekends to be full of making and doing; craft, science, days out and so on, but it isn’t anyones fault that it isn’t really, just circumstances. Where in life are people supposed to get downtime these days? Max works hard all week, i spend my week orchestrating education sandwiched between parcelling and my weekends trying to socialise with Max and still get all the work done i need to. He needs downtime, but by the weekend i simply don’t want to be actively organising meaningful things to be doing anymore, i want it to just happen. I want to be able to spot that one of them wants to do more science and for it to just happen, or wave my wand and for painting in the garge to happen. Where are we supposed to find the time for everyone to get all the time they need? I feel like i run a race that is virtually identical to chasing a bus and panting up to each stop just as it moves off again.
People sometimes ask me where i find my hours in the day. Truth is, i’ve got as many as i can magic now, i can’t get everything done. I’m finally having to pay to get things done i used to enjoy achieving for myself because there is just no more room in my life. I’d have loved to make MP really great and be the person in charge of making the camps fabulous, but i’ve met my match. BM has taken over and i can barely handle it all really. If i claim back some r&r time for myself, i sink without a trace. If you could see the box of receipts i need to sort out 😕
Oh well.
Regardless, i managed to spend quite a bit of positive time with the children; Saturday afternoon was spent with most of us (Joey was sent to bed for being foul) sat round the table, it was too hot to go outside. Me and the girls beaded, Max sudukoed and it was pleasant enough. I gamed with them all, did a bit of weeding, did some tidying; blah blah. Max went bike hunting and then in the evening we determinedly shunned computers for each other and watched tv together over a bottle of wine and some beer.
Sunday mostly revolved around similar; Fran and i went shopping and bought Maddy a copy of Animal Crossing. I was very touched by how helpful and generous Fran was, giving her lots of money and several precious flowers (which is far more than i did!) Maddy was thrilled, was jammy enough to get a gorgeous town with an island and has played lots with us. She’s perked up loads, i think she was feeling a bit left out. I picked up our new bedside tables and while out with Fran we had an incredibly long conversation about cancer, antibodies, blood cells, immune systems, meningitis, chicken pox, bacteria, viruses, vaccines, antibiotics and more. It just went on and on.
Josie has been really miserable; she came down with something that made her very hot and limp and rather bleary looking on Wednesday. She scared me once before the beans arrived by just flopping on my and whimpering, again while they were here by flashing a blackish splodge at me (felt tip) and then thoroughly again at 3am when she woke me up and was apparently completely covered in bluish bruises. Turns out the leaking felt tip in question was secreted in her bed 🙄 Took me to shriek, turn all the lights on and start rolling glasses on her to sufficiently wake up enough to realise that was the case though. She has grumbled for days, probably earache given Fran and Amelie have both complained of the same, but probably more to do with cutting all 4 incisors at once. Poor girl 🙁
Today we’ve pottered, but pottered quite productively. I got up early enough to get my parcelling done quickly and the girls got through some normals with no fuss; Maddy on 2x tables, Fran on a Quick Tests and Amelie on a numbers book, then everyone did some writing/ETC/GD type things.
After lunch i made them all sit down and read; Fran read several chapters of Mrs Pepperpot
Maddy read a variety of books (well, looked at them, so she says) and Amelie and i did some stories and basic reading together. Eventually that morphed into a bookshop game, then we did some SOTW on the Byzantine Empire, then everyone went and played in the sprinkler. Fran is currently on Cluefinders Year 4, which she seems to particularly like.
My cottage, done to the pattern of the cross stitch design we made and Fran did last year. I rather like it in Hama.
Oh, and the title is reference to Maddy and Amelie coming to blows over who gets to be Belle in this house… but we’ll draw a veil over that…much as Amelie is doing anyway; she has decided to be a scarf lady (their lingo for our Muslim friends) and has been in full headscarf for several days, including around Sainsburys. I have pointed out that full conversion may be somewhat complex at age 4, but she seems adamant that that is the way she is going… hence the return to SOTW. We’re nearly at Islam and i might as well educate her while we’re at it. 🙂 😉
An island eh? Lucky girl 🙂
How lovely of Fran to help her sister out, your girls sound so sweet.
I don’t seem to be able to grow hybrids in the new town, but you can’t have it all I guess…
What do I need to play animal crossing? And also: how much doe sit cost to connect it to the net and stuff like that? I think its looks cute and I might ask it for my bday as something to de-stress…
It’s a whole different language you’re talking.
Bleargh to the felt tip incident, that must have been very scary.
A DS (preferably a DS Lite or you’ll wish you had!) for roughly £100 plus a game card for £30 and a wireless internet connection ideally or a Nintendo USB wireless thingy. It is good, but not cheap 😕
For years I felt that weekends had to be productive. I never found happiness, now they just happen and I love them!
Yep, having seen Merry’s DS Lite, the ‘old’ DS looks positivley ancient. ROFL to the felt tip in the bed.
Hmm, weekends, i know what you mean. I do like a bit of mix, and being able to look back and feel so good things happened because we made bit of effort. I think I need to make list of variosu things we’d like to go and do/visit etc. to remind us of what we could go and do.
I so know what you mean about wanting weekends to be fun but not having the energy left to arrange it – and I don’t have a business to run alongside everything else! About AC, otoh, I have very little idea what you’re on about (kind of a cross between the Sims and Neopets, yes?) but am quite happy with that level of knowledge, thank you 😉
We have noticed that weekends have become ‘bleurgh’ here, it needs sorting. I love the hama cottage.
The cottage looks great. Cross stitch sounds like a good source for Hama designs.
Did you ever do Where’s Wally? picture puzzles? I had a jumbo book at college and used to put them on my door. One of them was a sporting scene and had “saved by the bell” depicted as a Scarlett O’Hara type woman breaking up a boxing match.
Buzz adores where’s wally! He also has a Dennis the menace one. He spends ages with them!
Perhaps you need a few weeks of having “school weeks” and “weekends off” to let some of the pressure off of you to make weekends a time when something can happen. Our weekends are non existant, all of Saturdays are somehow taken up with a one hour martial arts lesson and then Sundays are spent catching up on putting clothes away, doing the garden or whatever so I can sympathise. We don’t even have the added pressure of “socialising” LOL!