Day 3 of the summer holidays was
Saturday. I was off work, so wanted to take the boys out of the house. They’d
been bouncing off the walls the last couple of days, so I figured it was due to
boredom / needing a change of scenery and something to do.
We went to the library, and J
signed up for The Big Friendly Read. He has a little passport type book to fill
in with six books that he reads over the summer holidays – any six books he
likes – and he is rewarded if he completes the challenge. It reminds me of the
Book Trail I used to do at my local library as a kid – does anyone else
remember that? Anyway, he was well up for the idea, so we have hired three
books to kick him off – one is short stories about dragons, the other is short
stories about robots, and the third is short stories about dinosaurs. While we
were there, we saw that the library was running a treasure hunt that day – you had
to find six Roald Dahl images around the library and note down what number they
were marked as, and what the character name of the image was. It took us the
best part of an hour, but J was well into it and interacting with all the
library assistants happily discussing the characters, where he’d found them,
and the ones that took a bit longer to find. I was surprised there were so few
people there, but I suppose as the weather was nice very few people thought
about visiting the library to waste some time that day – it tends to be busier
on a wet afternoon in the holidays, not one when the temperature outside is
almost 30 degrees!
After that we headed to the
market and had a mooch about for a while, then we went to Subway and got some
lunch. J said it was too crowded and noisy in Subway to eat there, so we headed
down to the riverside and found a quiet spot to sit on a bench in the shade of
a willow tree. By the time we got there, Baby A was fast asleep in his
pushchair, so he slept while J and I had our lunch and a chat and generally
relaxed in the sunshine.
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Sunday was day 4 of the summer
holidays, and we went over to Grandma and Grandad P’s house for the afternoon.
Grandad P cooked Sunday dinner, Baby A rolled around on the living room floor
quite a lot (he’s crawling backwards and rolling brilliantly, but still not
found forward gear with his crawling so he backs into corners and gets annoyed
quite a lot) J was quite overexcited so after dinner he went to the park with
Grandma and Daddy P for a little while to let off some steam. We got home late,
he was put in bed, but then was back downstairs again by 9pm and ended up
sitting on the sofa cuddled up, first with me and then with Daddy P, until I
went up when Baby A woke up around midnight and when I got back downstairs
again after settling him I found J asleep on the sofa and Daddy P asleep in the
armchair. I woke Daddy P to carry J up to bed and went to bed myself.
Monday / Day 5 – I was working
from home today, and this morning the internet connection was completely rubbish
so it kept messing about and dropping my connection. The boys hadn’t slept well
and they were grumpy and Daddy P hadn’t slept well so he was grumpy. It was a
rocky old day with arguments, cross words, I struggled to get my work done,
Daddy P wanted to get the gardening done, the boys wanted our full attention …
It was rough. I have an ultimate plan though. I’m off work tomorrow and
Wednesday, so have made plans for both days with friends of mine who have kids
in J’s class at school, so J has someone to play with while I get some adult
conversation and we get out of the house. As I’ve managed (finally) to get a
decent amount of hours work done today, it means that for Thur, Fri, Sat and
Sun I’m not under as much pressure to get as much work done, so I can take it a
little more easy and take a break every so often to concentrate on the boys
rather than trying to get my head down and crack on with lots of hours like I
was trying to do today.
I love my job, I love being able
to work from home and on the whole work around the boys – but times like this,
not even so much today because Daddy P was home to help with the boys, even
though he was grumpy about it, it’s the holidays that are really hard because J
deserves to be going somewhere, not sitting at home playing computer games and
watching TV – he deserves my attention, my patience, not me telling him “in a
minute” and snapping at him for wanting a moment of my time. I hope we can
enjoy tomorrow and Wednesday without any huge issues, and I can relax, and we
can muddle through the next four days before we go on holiday and I have 2
weeks off work to devote every moment to my gorgeous boys and doing all kinds
of things that they’ll enjoy.
I had a day of feeling like a bad
mummy today, feeling guilty for trying to juggle work and home life and feeling
like I dropped everything instead, having total mum guilt for having to work at
all, but I tried my best and I have to remember that’s all anyone can ask.
Tomorrow is another day!
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