The second Winter Lockdown Weekend, done. And I know I am not the only person fervently hoping there are only two more to go. We were reminded once again that while the long, long first lockdown was beyond painful, we were blessed with almost endless sunshine. The patio doors were never closed, we spent hours just naffing about in the garden having picnics, making obstacle courses, perfecting our piggy-back football matches and burying what eventually amounted to a plague of dead mice.
But a weekend in November? Eurgh. A whole different ball game. The rain on Saturday was relentless. A walk was out of the question. Never mind the kids being miserable about it, I didn’t fancy it much.
Two days felt like a full week in real money. Normally, I have an aversion to wasting time - I can’t even sit down in the middle of the day when I know I could be doing something useful - but this weekend I found myself drawing out everything for as long as possible.
So it was a bit of a shock when at 10.45am on Sunday as Bella and I drifted upstairs to get dressed, having spent the past hour cutting Christmas tree shapes out of felt for her to stick to the underside of Henry’s top bunk so she could look at them while she went to sleep ‘and wish for Christmas’, she asked if it was a school day. She’d been up for the best part of three hours and Xander had already been for a nap and got up again. Yet she was holding her school dress in one hand, head on one side, nose crinkled, and genuinely asking me if it was 8.30am.
Which reminded me why all this is so much easier for the kids: they have no concept of time. And that’s really been the crux of it through this whole year. My overriding emotion since March - besides occasional anxiety, waves of stress and constant general pissed-off-ness - has been such sadness that their little lives are on hold. No adventures, no parties, no trips of any description, just so many walks and so much bloody colouring, Minecraft and Netflix.
But I think in reality they don’t fully understand how long this has been going on. Kids don’t recognise the passing of time in any real sense. They talk about ‘when coronavirus is over’ with such confidence and finality, as if one day it’ll just disappear and that’ll be that.
That said, no one can accuse them of wasting this year. They’ve achieved as much if not more than they have in any other year. Henry lost his first two teeth, learnt the complete George Ezra back catalogue on his guitar, and he’s not worn anything but shorts since March.
Bella has learnt to ride her bike without stabilisers, picked up the expression ‘what the jiggins’ and, just this weekend, completed an unsolicited 48-hour singathon in which she sang ‘When Santa got stuck up the chimney’ on a loop, stopping only to sleep.
So I’ve decided to take a leaf out of their book. Time is now meaningless and I’m going with the flow. On Saturday we had a pizza party accompanied by the sounds of the Michael Buble Christmas album. Definitely a record in our house. Then I let them stay up till 9pm, partly because I was feeling reckless and partly because I just couldn’t be bothered to herd them into bed after all that pizza.
And this morning as I was about to leave for a run, headphones in, excited for the alone time, Andy ordered Henry to come with me because he was pinging off the walls. So my biggest boy and I went splashing through the mud along the canal, chatting rubbish and encouraging each other up the hills.
And later on we all went for a walk and I allowed them both to consume an entire tube of Fruit Pastilles along the way. That doesn’t sound so wild - and writing it makes me feel like a proper weirdo - but I’m a bit obsessive about the amount of sugar they eat. They couldn't believe their luck.
But you know what, to paraphrase Daniel Bedingfield, we’ve gotta get through this, so we might as well all relax and make the best of it. So from now on it’s all about saying ‘hell, why not?’
That said I’m holding strong in the face of small person pressure to get the box of Christmas decorations out of the loft just yet. At least not until the Halloween decorations have moved from their spot on the spare bed back to their space in the loft. I have to draw the line somewhere.
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