School goes back tomorrow and I have a serious case of Sunday blues except on a Wednesday. I am grateful that they are back on a Thursday just for two days and then home again for a long weekend. Nothing like easing one back into routine by stuffing up the routine after two days. I mean I can’t possibly pack lunches more than twice in a row just yet.
I have been spared the Sunday night blues for so many years I’d almost forgotten about that leaden stomach wad of dread. Sometimes it used to arrive on Saturday afternoon depending on the contents of the coming week. At Uni it was particularly bad when microbiology was on a Monday – although now I look back on those uni days and wonder what I ever grizzled about. Assignments get finished. So do exams. Parenthood and having to be a responsible grown up who doesn’t eat whole bags of snakes in one sitting goes on and on and on and you can’t finish something and think yay tomorrow I can sleep unitil noon and then go to the pictures.
Tomorrow, when school takes the children off my hands for a few hours, is when I stop being the holiday entertainment and catering monitor (without resorting too much to telly and sausages) and start having to do all the things that were put on hold because Christmas and January and G&T and ‘but I can’t possibly think while the children need me to play UNO and collect shells’.
Tomorrow’s list is long. It includes lunchbox fruit and financial advisors and organising collecion of household items and work bits and pieces. And there’s a hopeful little dot point titled, ‘exercise’, which is a vaguely familiar notion that may or may not be re-scheduled in favour of a little sit down and a nostalgic summery gelato.
I am, however, grateful that tomorrow DOES NOT include back to school bullshit like book covering. I give in to the protests of my chidren every year when I declare book covering a waste of time, paper and landfill space. I talk myself into the idea that it can be a lovely crafternoon, an expression of their creativity and personality. And then every year I shout at the contact and cut myself on the sticky tape and send the children away because they label the pencils wrong and someone’s clip board is missing and it turns into a very fucking sticky angry mess. Eventaully we are all saved by a dear friend who has seen my facebook distress and appears like an angel on my doorstep with things called REUSABLE SLIP COVERS which slide onto the books with a soothing little ‘shhh’ and don’t have to have anything peeled off them.
But we wouldn’t get Sunday night blues if Fridays weren’t so lovely. We wouldn’t get winter blues if Summer wasn’t so gorgeous. And I wouldn’t be feeling melancholy right now if my holidays hadn’t been so nice. Thank you sun and sand dunes, friends and family, laughter and Luna Park, seaside weddings and ski biscuits. Thank you waves and watermelon, fishing and floating, puppies and paddles, dancing and dozing. Thank you magnolia flowers and flathead. Thank you the theatre and the cinema, the ice skating rink and the cast and crew of “Wicked” (OMG). Thank you Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill” and London Grammar’s “Rooting for You”. Thank you holidays. I loved you even when the Westerly wind blew our shack time out of the water, when Birchalls had sold out of exercise books, when my thong got washed away and when the cows got in and ate my scabiosa.
And oh joy I’m going to hold onto you a little bit longer because even though I’d like to go to bed, I’ve just reembered there’s a school hem down. Fuckit.
Categories: MUMblings, Navelgazery
Tags: back to school, cowrie, holidays, magnolia, Parenting, scabiosa, summertime
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