Between Us: Things I'm Thinking of Writing About
My kids have just broken up for the summer holidays (solidarity, please) and I still have posts in my drafts folder that I started in January. Here are some of the things I’ve started to write about: your task, if you choose to accept, is to help me to arrange them into a list in order of importance by simply letting me know in the comments which of them you’d like to see first.
Maybe you don’t want to read any of them: then we’re really in trouble.
I must say that I am not dreading the six week break as much as I normally would, because the kids are older now (9 and 11) and will actually amuse themselves pretty well for a good few hours a day, even with their one hour screen rule*.
(*Don’t come for me on the one hour screen rule. I’m not trying to be one of those smug uber-mums who hand-washes all the laundry using homemade soap, or sends the kids into school with a packed lunch consisting of Ottolenghi salad, a tub of pomegranate seeds and cutlery made from recycled bamboo. The one hour screen rule was something we introduced after we realised that for the first six or so years of the kids’ lives we had let them sit and watch Peppa Pig for at least 50% of their waking hours - it’s amazing they didn’t learn to oink instead of talk. We’re simply trying to relieve some of our own guilt. Rich is much more of a stickler for it than I am, I have to say - I’m much more swayed towards “having an easy life”.)
But then there’s always a tipping point, with the long holiday and the kids being at home, and it is always when I am knee deep in one work task and have just realised I’d forgotten another more important work task, and one of them will come in and say they’re bored (always the 9 year old) or hungry (also the 9 year old but often the 11 year old) and my whole carefully-built, overly-optimistic defensive wall of stress-management and time-keeping will just immediately crumble, like it’s been hit with a wrecking ball.
OK tell me which of these you’d like to see first:
