22 May What keeps you going in your busy week?
Waking up on Mondays, with so many mum things to fit in, it can feel like the week will go on forever.
Playgroup on Tuesdays, Mother’s Group on Thursdays and Music on Fridays. The other two days are work/daycare. It can be a punishing timetable and sometimes I rebel. I decide no extra curricular activities at all and we stay home.
This decision to trash the activities is all good on Tuesday but by Friday, chances are I’ve caved. Why?? Because I’ve discovered that even when fitting all that into a week wears me out (especially now I’m very pregnant)it also revives me, connecting me with other like minded mums who face the same challenges every week.
At Playgroup I get to hang out with a great group of ladies of all ages, backrgrounds, interests and agendas. We find out about who’s kids sleep and why and whose do not. Who wants to eat and who doesn’t, how to toilet train, how not to. How to cope with life in general. We marvel at how quickly the kids and pregnant bellies grow. Pretty soon we’re waving good-bye as another family ‘graduates’ from Playgroup to school.
At Mother’s Group the gathering is smaller and the kids are fewer but the energy they share is big. Fresh from Central Queensland, and knowing one member of the group I gate crashed this group of teachers, bookkeepers, accountants and mums and was welcomed with open arms. The conversation turns to house renovations, school, kindy, daycare and the number of kids we have or want to have, when we might go back to work, why we work, why we don’t want to work. We share drinks, tennis and coffee outside of the crazinesss that is a morning at the playcentre. Bonds are formed and we wonder what we’ll do when we no longer have kids to bring.
Music is frustrating. Ruben isn’t musical, he’s not interested in playing the instruments and he doesn’t sing. What he does like is marching, hiding the keys, running round the room and trying to escape into the toilets. But we keep going because I’m learning that he’s learning. Learning to take instructions, learning to share with other kids and learning about music even if he doesn’t use it. Besides that the parents are lovely and his teacher is burst of sunshine every week.
Music leads to morning tea. Ruben and I sharing cake and chino’s and looking forwarding to our weekend with Dad at home.
Weekends are great. I open my eyes to Dad on a Saturday morning, and breathe a sigh of relief that the week didn’t go on forever.
Come Monday I will smile knowingly to myself, content in the knowledge that the upcoming week is sure to bring me all the energy that I didn’t know I needed!