Thursday 3 October 2013

At The Risk of Sounding Like an Awful Mum....


Am I a really awful mother if I admit that I am ready for the kids to go back to school?

Some days it seems like every one is talking about how much they love having the kids home from school and ow they don't want the holidays to end and I'm all "um Yeah aha - what day do they go back again"?

Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my boys, I really do. But sometimes I compare spending day in and day out with them for weeks on end, kind of like the biggest mother of all roast dinners. At the time it is all "YES! Awesome!" and you load your plate up high and enjoy every precious morsel until you are stuffed to the eyeballs ... and then later you collapse onto the couch with your eyes rolling into the back of your head, too full of a good thing to do pretty much anything but just lie there and hope that no one wants ANYTHING of you....

or something like that.

These holidays for some reason the kids have bickered more than ever.

Not big fights, you know punch ups or anything .... who am I kidding, there were definitely some punch ups in there. But it was more the constant whinging at each other and the just annoying the crap out of each other kind of thing.

It is probably my fault as these holidays I decided to embrace the whole Earth Mother thing and throw routine to the curb, opting to just go with the flow and be spontaneous and spend as much time outdoors in the fresh air as possible.

That didn't work out so much for us as I discovered that someone who is now running her own business, needs structure and balance and damn it - I like routine. The kids like routine. Routine is what stops us from tearing limbs from each other.

My house looks like a bomb exploded, I can't even open the laundry door for the piles of washing built up behind it, I haven't picked up a magazine, knitting needles, or read a blog or even replied to comments on this blog for over a week. Heck I didn't even have the time or the energy to write a blog post at all yesterday and that is so not me - normally I MAKE time for blogging because I love it so much. I have played catch up working into the wee hours every night for nearly every night the past two weeks and I'm ashamed to asmit that my hair hasn't seen a bottle of shampoo for at least 5 days.

Yep we most definitely thrive on routine around here.

I don't want to sound like one of those ungrateful mums who hates spending time with their kids, that is so not the way it is as I do love them to bits... so much so that I feel a desperate need to share the joy with someone else for a while ... like their teachers maybe.

But among the arguments and the exhaustion of the past two weeks, there were plenty of special moments too.

Memories were created and much like childbirth I think us Mum's have natural amnesia to school holidays, or at least it seems that I do. Because I know that by week 3 of the school term I will be looking at the calender checking out how many weeks we have left until the next holidays roll round.

And so goes the cycle...

What about you - how did you cope these holidays?
Are you a routine kind of family or do you prefer to freeball?