Staycation

The summer school holidays here last for six weeks. That’s a long time for the lad to be in vacation care – not that it’s even open for two of those six weeks. I’ve been lucky enough since he’s been at school to have the christmas/new year week, and a bit longer, off work. This year I decided to take three weeks off.

When I tell people that’s what’s happening they always ask if we’re going away. Like you’re supposed to go away if you’re not at work. I suppose I’m a culprit of this question to other people as well.

No, we’re not going away, we’re hanging at home. Apart from a night away here and there that is.

We’re a week and a bit into the holidays and now that the christmas hoo-ha is out the way I’m starting to relax. It’s new year’s eve today and I was awake and up just after 7am. It’s going to be quite warm so I wanted to get the dog’s walk out the way. I’d done that, come home, fed the dog, watered the garden and put a load of washing on by 8am.

We’ve had something on every day and the moments we do get at home I potter around doing the bare minimum and JJ is playing an Xbox game he bought with christmas money.

The dog follows me around and seems to have found a spot he likes under the kitchen table. I’ve got to be careful not to go out and leave him under there.

The other day JJ invited a friend over and we went to Grange beach – a beach I don’t normally go to. While they spent over an hour in the water I setup on the beach and just watched the world go by. Some people sat down right in front of me spoiling my view so I moved! There was plenty of room to sit elsewhere and they had a bloody chair as well.

Once I got the boys out the water we found a fish and chip shop, bought some food and drove until we found a park to sit in and eat. We found a wetlands with heaps of birds and tried to ignore all the bird shit on the table we sat at. Lucky we had a plate in the form of the paper wrapped around the chips.

The boys played on the playground and I even joined in pushing them on a big swing thing and got them to push me around on it as well. Playgrounds have changed heaps since I was a girl. For a start they are a lot more colourful and the equipment is quite different. Except for the swings. I think there will always be swings. Just the seat has changed from a wooden seat to a rubber seat.

It’s days like this that I like about having a staycation. We did something we don’t normally do, well not at those particular locations. It didn’t matter what time we got home as there were no major commitments for the next day. And the weather was perfect.