Weekends, Football, Rugby, and Spitfires
People always comment that they are having “one of those days” when they are running here, there, and everywhereholding onto life by their fingertips while trying to be everything for everybody, and to get everything done for everybody else. It strikes me that there comes a point when every day is “one of those days”. It's happening to me now.
Most people look forward to the weekend. They look forward to a couple of days resta couple of days doing what they want. Once you have children, that's not quite how it works. Once you have three children, that's certainly not how it works.
My Saturday was spent washing up, dropping children to football practice, grocery shopping, repairing bicycles, cutting the lawn (or at least attempting to before the lawn mower expired in a cloud of blue smoke), and attending a school fund-raiser. My Sunday was spent washing up, dropping children to rugby training, clothes shopping, helping with school projects, emergency grocery buying, washing up, and finally sitting here wondering where the hell the weekend went.
We did fit a movie into the weekendon Friday night. Age of Ultronthe new(ish) Avengers movie. It was entertaining in the way the sixth or seventh season of Frasier wasthe actors all seemed like they were just going through the motionspicking up the paycheck. The appearance of the Hulk-busting Iron Man upgrade seemed entirely designed to sell toys. Maybe I'm being unfair.
Perhaps the highlight of the weekend was seeing our middle girl taking part in rugby practice. She has just moved clubs, and after playing throughout her entire childhood with the boys, is in a girls side for the first time. The new club do the girls training very differentlymixing all of the ages together for the girls and women's teamsso she spent the morning practising rucks and malls with the adult women's team. She's only 11! To avoid injury during training, and to concentrate on the more technical aspects of the game, they were only playing “touch rugby” anyway, so she was in her element. Of course it helps that an 11 year old has less than half the body mass of a 20 year old, so can turn inside opponents at will.
After returning home this evening I finally got around to helping our youngest build her first model kita Supermarine Spitfire. We bought it to help with her school projectthey are doing “World War 2? this autumn. We now have an assembly of pieces of plastic fuselage sitting in the junk room, held together by a number of clothes pegs. It's taken me back 30 years to my childhood, and my brother making all manner of Airfix, Revell, Hasegawa, and Tamiya model kits. Of course, the danger in helping her make the model kits is that I will end up making model kits too. I joked to my other half this evening that maybe it might even be a good hobby for me.