I got most of what I needed to get done done today but none of it was particularly spectacular so I am without any great sense of achievement really. 🙁 I hate bank holidays. When I was a child my parents always seemed to spent the extra time off work as an opportunity to row more and from the age of 14 I worked in Mum’s restaurant so bank holidays were an extra working day, leaving there to go to retail meant bank holidays were worked in the early days to get the time and a half and day off in lieu deal, latterly when time and a half didn’t exist any more in retail management they became a miserable chance to beg and plead with my staff (who had lives outside of work) to work them. In all the time Ady and I have been together he has worked pretty much every single bank holiday and I have only ever had two years worth of different office jobs where I got bank holidays off. Since having the children they feel even worse as everywhere you look is full of families doing family stuff together so you either risk feeling like a single parent and join in with the family activities or stay home and mope!
So today Ady was off and gone before I even woke up, I faffed around reading blogs and waiting for a load of washing to go through the machine before hanging it out and going food shopping. The children got out loads of different paper (tissue, corregated, construction, textured and printed) and made a beach for their toys to play on with it. We went to Sainsburys where they were both very well behaved and did lots of counting, spotting different groceries and so on. Davies spotted some collect tokens and send away offer for a Wallace and Gromit modelling kit on ‘tip top’ cream products so we worked out the cheapest way of collecting the required amount and bought them (tokens duly removed from packaging and me and Davies walked to the post box to get it sent off when Ady got home from work).
Home again for lunch and more hanging out of washing. I went through the big pile of paperwork of creditors stuff and sorted that out including sending a couple of emails to CCCS to update them.
The children played with various things although nothing for very long. I sat and did some drawing and colouring with them for a while of Madagascar characters, Davies did some writing but he is very tired and hasn’t got any great attention span at the moment, he so needs an early night or a late morning and can’t seem to manage either. 🙄 We got out the marble run and I built them a huge run which amused them for all of about ten minutes before it got knocked over. Scarlett then spent some time playing with that by herself. Davies got out his k’nex but then put them away again, got out some magnetic word tiles and stuck some on the fireguard to spell out obscure and nonsensical sentences before putting them away too.
They were amused for a while by the colouring in online again from yesterday but even that didn’t last more than about half an hour. I offered to read to Davies, watch a film with him, sit with him while he read to me, do some more writing, do a jigsaw but none of it appealed. I refused to ‘play’ at making Wallace and Gromit with geomags or get the plasticine out as either of those activities would have had me more bored than him. I also offered various websites or pc games all of which were refused. But I kept my patience and temper at least. Scarlett painted my toenails and her own fingernails and eventually they did disappear off to their bedrooms for a self created game for the last hour or so of the day and I started Catch 22.
I’m popping out shortly to give my Dad a tow – again 🙄 as his van has packed up again and is booked in at the garage tomorrow but needs to be gotten there and hopefully evening bank holiday traffic will be quieter that early Tuesday morning traffic. Then tonight we have my favourite dinner of stir fry followed by chocolate! Tomorrow I’ve organised at Activeo event at Highdown Gardens but the only taker so far is Julie so I expect it will just be us with our picnics. And in the evening I have reading group.
As someone who has spent the last 6 xmas days, and the last 5 NYDs acting like a single parent, I can understand how you feel about bank holidays – and another 4 xmases to go before Bob gets one off. He was off today, as it happened to be a rest day anyway, on the rota, but it’s a bloody miserable time, really.
Comment by Joyce — 17 April 2006 @ 7:24 pm