If you’ve never sat down and worked out how much your children cost you, may I take this opportunity to caution against it. We did it once and it only caused stress, disbelief and a lot of questions.
Such as, are second hand shoes really as bad for their feet as people say? Which is harder to blag in a social situation, tennis or football? Do they really need to learn to swim?
I once totted up what I was spending on extra-curricular activities for two children in one school term and discovered it would have bought Andy and I a full week away in a nice hotel. UK-only but, you know, a week away.
Only a month or two before lockdown I also found myself doing some headache-inducing logistical planning to try and work out if Henry could move his swimming lesson from a Sunday at 11am to a Wednesday at 5pm and if he did could tennis move to a Tuesday or would a Saturday morning be better or should I convince him to quit football which seems to involve more time getting changed than actually playing. And so on.
At the risk of all this sounding like we are considerably richer than you (90s comedy reference), I should point out that their school offers some reasonably priced after-school activities which are cheaper than the standard after-school babysitting service (they don’t call it that but they feed them potato waffles and sit them in front of the TV so I call it that), so it buys me an extra hour or so to work at the end of the school day.
Plus I figure he’s getting some bonus running around time and/or learning a skill so I’m all for it. I did, however, draw the line at Art Club which was £10 a pop. Instead I did a trolley dash at HEMA and promised we could do DIY art club at home every Friday after school. It lasted three weeks and now I have a cupboard bursting with pipe cleaners, pom poms and PVA glue.
Anyway, right up until lockdown Henry’s social calendar was starting to really stress me out, and Bella's wasn’t far behind. If it wasn’t swimming, tennis, Beavers, football, cricket or guitar it was birthday parties, sleepovers and playdates. We had two evenings a week that were officially free - and which I was determined would remain so - but come Friday we more often than not ended up round at someone’s house till 6.30pm playing out (them) and drinking wine (me).
I haven’t really given all these activities a second thought since the world was mothballed back in March. But at the weekend the kids were playing quite near a pond of undetermined depth, and I found myself wondering whether they’d remember how to swim. (I decided Henry would be ok but Bella, who had only really got seriously water confident in January, might require rescuing and the thought of jumping in after her was the only thing that made me get up and wander over to supervise.)
I realised then how much time I have spent bemoaning their hobbies, huffing about having to be here, there and everywhere, often dragging two extra kids along for the ride, carting everyone in and out of the car, needing to be organised to within an inch of my life to fit a meal in at some point when one or other of them needs to get home, change and get out for a club in half an hour.
The demands on my time have not lessened in lockdown, but have changed. There’s far less chivvying than usual and zero ferrying, no stripping muddy football kit off in the porch or frantically searching for a woggle at 6.28pm.
I’m not saying I particularly miss it, but now all that is gone I realise I had become rather fond of what it represented. Busy kids, dashing from this to that, speed-eating a ham sandwich and bag of hula hoops in the car on the way there, then regaling us with stories and updates on the way home before collapsing into bed knackered and happy before starting it all again the next day.
I’m sure that within a fortnight of Normal Life resuming I’ll be cursing our hectic lives, but I hope I will do so with new recognition that actually the mad rushing around in pursuit of the kids living their life as kids should is far preferable to the alternative: kicking footballs at an empty goal, making up dance routines alone and dicing with death at the edge of a murky pond.
But, as I strain to see the silver lining, I am focusing on the money we’ll have saved while everything’s on hold and am convincing myself that maybe we can justify that post-Covid week away after all...
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