It’s a funny old thing, because it’s still hardwired into my psyche that the weekends are the best part of the week, but ever since having children weekends actually kind of suck.
I spend all week looking forward to seeing my lovely husband, getting time to myself, seeing friends, but it very rarely works out that way. For starters there’s a lot of pressure that everyone has to enjoy themselves and we have to make the most of it, which is never a good place to start and seems to aggravate The Man from the get go and if anything is going to put a black cloud over a family it’s a patriarch with a face like a smacked arse.
Then there’s all the extra meals. For some reason I can’t get away with the scratch meals The Boy and I usually partake of during the week. In fact, when he has lunch at preschool I have been known to have the very nutritious option of a bowl of cereal for lunch – ho hum. Added to this is the expectation of a big weekend breakfast of some kind, a Sunday roast and – if we have friends to stay – baking, puddings, a ‘special’ main course and, without the luxury of a dishwasher, endless piles and piles of washing up.
Often the weekend entails a trip to the allotment (with the ensuing three lots of muddy clothes) visits to friends or family (with fours lots of smart clothes which indubitably get smeared with food, sick or some other substance) and the washload seems to triple.
Just the thought of it makes me want to bang my head off the kitchen table in depression. Aren’t weekends supposed to be leisurely lunches round a scrubbed oak table, drinks in a sunny pub garden, cheery hikes over the verdant countryside with no whingeing toddler or sulky husband… ? Occasionally we hit paydirt – just see my post from last bank holiday Monday which only prolongs the agony because you look back and think “it is possible”, but let’s face it, it’s the exception not the rule.
Anyway, enough whining now. I have a washload to do, a three year old to lever back into bed (for the fourteenth time), a baby to feed and a husband to entertain.
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