That Sunday feeling

The problem with weekends is that they are just too short. Well I say that, when I was a WFH mum weekends really only stood out in so much as I could hand over some of my everyday tasks to Mr FDMTG, which was nice, but it was hardly the break that I had come to understand a weekend to mean.

This is a hangover from my school days, when the weekend was the most exciting time of the week. Saturday night was the night for discos, snogging, bar hopping and generally getting into trouble. Hmm, thinking about this perhaps it is no bad thing that my weekends are a touch more sedate than they were in my teenage years.

One particularly riotous escapade occurred when my friend and I decided to put our somewhat shaky command of maths to work on the finances of our weekend drinking. We came up with the bright idea that rather than cough up a few quid per drink in the local den of vice, we should instead buy direct from the supplier (in this case an off licence of dubious repute) and drink our tipple of choice straight from the bottle.

I remember buying the vodka, the first few slugs and then nothing more until I woke up in a hospital bed the next morning, feeling as if I had been run over by several buses and then come down with the world's most earth shattering case of food poisoning.

To make matters even worse I was meant to be staying at my friend's house, with her delightfully straight-laced parents that weekend. On that bleak Sunday morning I returned to the pastel haven that was their home and was promptly shoved into the guest bedroom to puke my way to repentance, until they could return this 'bad influence' back to her own louche parents, never to be invited to lead their daughter astray again.

Tales like this might make you wonder why I recall my school day weekends with such fondness but, mercifully for my liver, such excesses were not the norm. Instead weekends were a blur of dancing at neon lit clubs to 90s dance music. I can't hear Sash Encore Une Fois without instantly being transported to flinging my hands above my head, on a packed dance floor, fuggy with cigarette smoke as me and my gay best friend did our best to pretend that we really were part of the cool crowd.

There was the painfully pretentious bar where we would sip over priced cocktails - the livid green, banana-flavoured Pisang Orange was a firm favourite - as we bitchily ripped apart the other clientele. The cafe where all the ex-pat brats (I grew up in Brussels) would meet to flirt, kiss, drink and fuel interschool feuds. Then there was the crazy few weeks I dated a seriously cute Columbian bar tender, who turned out to have a sideline in dealing something a whole lot stronger than Stella Artois.

The problem with those Saturday nights was that they were always followed by Sunday afternoons, when you suddenly realised that you hadn't even glanced at your homework and you had to be up inhumanly early the next morning with everything ready to  hand in. It is a lifelong trait of mine to leave everything to the last minute, so Sunday evenings were characterised by frantically cramming some project that should have taken two weeks to compete into a couple of hours.

That sinking feeling of impending doom stayed with me throughout all of my years of education and employment. But as a freelance mummy working from home that Sunday feeling hasn't troubled me for a long while.

That is until now, when going back to work reminded me with a jolt just how short weekends are and how futile it is to spend all day Sunday wishing that it wasn't Monday tomorrow.

Perhaps that's why this post from The Daily Mash, which suggests we could all  have a six day weekend if we stopped dicking around at work, made me laugh out loud. After just a few short weeks back in an office I am reminded once again that if we spent less time in meetings talking about work and more time actually,  you know, doing it, the concept of a six-day weekend could easily become a reality. I might just go and set up a Change.org petition to campaign in favour of this, after all Cameron can't ignore the fact that me and all my Facebook pals agree, can  he?

School's out for summer

It's the end of term and all my sons are in party mood and ready to celebrate six weeks of freedom. No surprise as the last few days at school seem to have involved nothing but watching DVDs and eating cake in the classroom.

Strangely, despite the fact that I will be in sole command of my little troupe of terrors for the next few weeks, I am feeling equally demob happy. While I am sure that I will be a frazzled wreck come the end of summer I am gasping for a few weeks off school.

School can be very wearing, what with the early starts, endless pickups, interminable concerts, picnics, performances, cake sales, fetes and so on that require parental helpers (or at least those mums such as myself who appear to have 'MUG' tattooed on our foreheads). That's not to mention the politics and infighting that is the inevitable result of interacting with other people over something as fraught as the education and welfare of our precious children.

The moaning never ceases and even though I hold my hands up to being one of the worst culprits, I long for a break from it all. I don't want to worry about who will man the popcorn maker, who failed to put the things away properly in the PTA cupboard, who hasn't given their fiver for the teacher's collection, who has resigned from a key position on this or that committee leaving us in our perennial position of 'in the lurch'.

As I walk out of school today I want to shut the door on all of that and have five weeks with my boys. I want them to get up when they like and spend all day playing computer games if that's what they want. I want to explore sunlit fields searching for dragons in the undergrowth, I want to see just how wet and muddy they can get while playing in the local stream. I want them sticky with ice cream and lazy with days spent in the garden in the sunshine. I want to watch movies and not worry if they get to bed too late.

I don't want to nag about homework, or search for PE kits and book bags, I don't want to sign any permissions slips, or remember packed lunches, or make sure music practise is done. I don't want to do load after load of washing to ensure there is clean uniform available every day. I don't want to wake up at 7am to drag myself out of bed to extract my grumpy children from beneath their duvets. I don't want to start the day by screaming at them to remember to brush their teeth and to hurry their way through their breakfast or we will be late.

In short I am sick of the drudgery, the never-ending school runs and the unceasing flow of admin that has to be dealt with to manage the school lives of four children. The forms, the invitations, the applications for clubs, the music lessons, the tutors, the school applications…the list goes on and on.

This is why I think it is so important that we keep our long summer holiday. It's not for the children's sake, it's for all the parents. Of course the children love a break, but it's us mums and dads who need a few weeks away from the school gates. So I say hurrah for the summer holiday (but check back with me in a couple of weeks and see if the boys have managed to dampen my enthusiasm by then).

And the prize for most disorganised mum goes to....

I won't keep you in suspense as I scooped that one last night. Never mind that we had had seven weeks of summer holiday for me to label up the million new items of school uniform required by my two sons, or to get my eldest to do his homework, or to find all the lost school kit that had wandered off during the break. I still found myself running around like a headless chicken trying to fit all these tasks into about five minutes last night.

I am quite surprised that this only resulted in me leaving two of my sons in tears, I expected the full quartet to be in hysterics just like me. The fun kicked off when I finally opened up my seven-year-old's neglected book bag to discover what fiendish task had been set for us by his sadistic teachers as a goodbye gift from Year 2.

It was some nonsense about researching a famous Victorian, which naturally I could do in about five minutes with the aid of Google and Wikipedia, but when I suggested this course of action to my sanctimonious son he prissily pointed out that this was cheating and not something a well educated child like him could condone.

Instead of screaming "So what? We only have about 10 minutes before you have to be in bed, let's just get this done" like I wanted to. I bit my lip and waited while he torturously read and wrote out Isambard Kingdom Brunel's life story. Then I went into a tailspin when I realised that the twins had decimated our paper supplies with their obsession with drawin' and we had no A3 paper left with which to create his masterpiece. I was tempted by my friend's suggestion that an A4 poster would be more than sufficient, but we had already printed out all our pictures, which were too big to fit on A4 and the printer was predictably out of ink.

An emergency call to grandpa delivered us a pristine pad of A3 paper on which to glue my boy's tearstained work. My excuse for reducing him to tears with my banshee screams to hurry up is that the stains gave his work an authentically antique Victorian look. Not sure that covers making the two-year-old wail by yelling at him for innocently touching the homework in progress.

In the end I felt that my presence was perhaps not helping and I retreated upstairs to start labelling uniform. My god this is a thankless task, even though I have got being a lazy mum down to fine art and use stick on labels, whatever the manufacturers promise I know I will find all those painstaking attached name tags floating in the washing machine the moment I put any of the uniform into it. And even if they do stay stuck no one ever returns lost uniform anyway, whether there's a name in it or not, so really what is the point?

When I finally finished this Sisyphean task it was onto the next one which was actually tracking down all the mass of kit the boys need for school from book bags (fallen down behind the hall chest), to PE kit bags (buried under the coat mountain next to the front door) and their school coats (shoved at the bottom of the wardrobe).

Last but not least was finding some suitable object to send in in my younger boy's Talk Bag. I tried to get him to select something vaguely educational. "Why not take something from our holiday?" I suggest, trying to make up for my previous cheating lapse. But no, he was adamant that the only thing that would do was a yellow and pink spotted foam octopus bath toy. I was too worn down to argue, but there's a lollipop in it for any of his little friends who correctly identify the contents of that particular bag.

Still at least I was one step ahead of the friend who posted on Facebook as I virtually gnashed my teeth about homework. "What there was summer holiday homework?" Perhaps I should hand her the top spot on the podium after all.