Bank Holiday #2

Some days are, frankly, just a bit meh. Bank Holiday Monday this week was one of those for us.

For a start, OH had to work. This isn’t unusual, and is off-set by him being able to be quite flexible about days off for holidays and (with enough notice) for me to go and do work things, but it is hard to remember that when everyone else is having lovely days together as a family and no one wants to come and play with us, leaving me alone with the three children and no groups to go to.

Our plans with friends fell through at the last minute, as sometimes happens, and then Plans B and C also exploded. Somehow it is different having a quiet day at home when you know you just have no plans, to looking forward to a chill-out day with friends and it not happening.

I had also gone to bed far too late the night before (I’ve got in a bit of a rut recently with that) and so I was tired and grumpy. The kids picked up on my mood and were squabbly and moany. In hindsight we should have done some work as normal or baked a massive cake, or just gone out for the day, but I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to muster the energy needed to make a completely new plan. I really wanted to get down to the allotment - it is growing season, after all, and a brief session there by myself on Sunday left me desperate to crack on with getting potatoes in, beds dug over, loganberries tied back and all the other myriad jobs that suddenly need doing last week. The children had been bribed encouraged with the promise of vege hot dogs cooked over the camping stove but the prospect of going down by ourselves overrode the lure of food and they moaned and complained so much that I lost the will to insist.

And so Monday was spent slouching around the house (which is a mess), grumbling at each other and the boys playing far too many computer games. We did manage hot dogs in the garden.

In the evening, buoyed up by my very understanding OH and cheered considerably by a teaching session with some lovely students, I made a plan. I declared Tuesday to be Bank Holiday #2.

We got off to a good start by getting out of the house reasonably early and heading off to collect a bike seat for Ben to go on the back of my newly-acquired bike (I’m still trying to decide whether this acquisition is exciting or solid proof that I am insane). That done, we hit the garden centre for various things for the allotment and the garden, and with the car loaded up with good things we stopped off at Halfords for bike helmets (for me and Ben) before going home for lunch. Then we packed everything into the wheelbarrow and headed off to the plot, dire warnings of lost screen time effectively stifling any complaints from the boys. Possibly not my finest parenting tactic but the allotment is one of the few things we do for me and I felt it was a point that needed to be made.

Three and a half hours later, we had cut the grass, dug over three beds, planted horseradish (yes, I know, my fellow allotmenteers will curse me for that) and sowed beetroot, shallots and two types of potatoes. We were muddy and tired and happy and all agreed that our second attempt at Bank Holiday had been a great success.

Sometimes you just need to remember that tomorrow is another day.