Day 13

Happy Mother's Day :)

I was all prepared to break my 'getting up early' covenant this morning, as it would have been highly rude of me to refuse the Mother's Day gift of a sleep in... but fortunately my family (including my three-year-old niece) understand the importance of my quest and made sure that I wasn't put in a compromising position.

It's been a lovely weekend - and quite a reflection on my status as a mum. Without really realising it, I've gone through quite a transition inad the last few years. As a woman without kids, my priority was always avoiding any sort of solid commitment on weekends - keeping them free for whatever came up that was going to be fun to do. I hated the idea of signing up for anything that was going to require a guaranteed chunk of my time, and thought that the best kind of weekend was an empty, make-it-up-as-you-go-along type affair. Running around after children was about as high on my priority list as, say, poking razor blades between my teeth.

Once I had my first baby, weekends no longer represented doing whatever I wanted, but still, I was determined to make as much of 'my time' as possible. After all, the baby/toddler/very small child had basically no preference of his own, and could be easily convinced that whatever I wanted to do was worth going along with. For the most part, anyway. So a weekend was a sort of 'on duty' attempt at having my own fun. Isn't that the benefit of very small kids? They don't yet have their own little life outside of yours.

Finn was so excited to get
dressed in his soccer gear,
he forgot his clothes.

This weekend, we got up early on Saturday and got ready for Finn's soccer game. I headed off to coach netball, while Dave took the boys down to the soccer fields... apparently Finn didn't so much play soccer as wander around the field taking in the delights of the cheering crowd, while holding hands with a female team-mate. After the game, Finn was dropped off to a friend's birthday party, while I took Harvey and Lucy (my niece) for a walk down to watch the school rugby match, where Dave was helping out. Figured I may as well make yet another effort to figure the rules out, given that I will inevitably be spending many more Saturdays in my future as a footy mum. Then it was time to pick Finn up, and have a play at home with another little friend for the afternoon. The day was rounded off nicely by some giggling and chatter before going to bed sleep-over style (more giggling and chatter after lights out). After bedtime, my 'me-time' involved sneaking out in my tracky dacks for some telly and chatter with the girls (big night out, woah).

Kid fun.

The weirdest part is, that despite this kind of a Saturday being the stuff of nightmares to my kid-free self, I actually really enjoyed it. I'm not dreading the weeks and years of this to come, and there is something great about no longer feeling the pressure to make sure every weekend is 'the time of my life'. It's the time of someone else's life now, and that's cool. There's something intoxicating about seeing your children start to discover the stuff weekends are made of, and after all, isn't childhood the place where the concept of the 'fun weekend' is born? I like being part of the fabric that will hopefully be sewn into many wonderful memories of being a kid.

That said, the school clothes just got chucked in the dryer ready for tomorrow morning, and Finn's homework doesn't seem to have managed to get itself done yet. *sigh* Still getting the hang of the school mum thing. Sorry, List items #18 and #20.


Ciao. M xx