Working for the Weekend
I’d forgotten about the weekends.
For a long time, I’ve taken care of my to-do list on the weekdays. I grocery shopped, I made dentist appointments, I called the insurance company. I found a baby shower gift. I searched online for a recipe for that applesauce cake I was going to try to make. When weekends came, they were devoted to sleeping and eating waffles and having fun.
I anticipated the exhaustion I’d feel on weekday evenings after I started working, and it arrived right on schedule. By Thursday night last week my eyes were droopy at 6:30pm and Theo was singing his “Wake up, Mama!” song and reminding me that the sun wasn’t down yet. But I remembered that feeling, and I kind of sunk right back into it, my throat scratchy from talking all day and my feet hurting from wearing stiff shoes. For me, it’s a little of what accomplishment feels like. I like it.
But I’d forgotten about cramming the rest of my life into the weekends. Now we’re trying to do the fun stuff on Saturdays and Sundays – seeing friends and playing with cousins and going to the library and eating out – and then doing laundry and buying diapers and packing lunches after the kid goes to bed. No more lazy weekends for us.
I’m tempted to become a weekend hermit, holing up with my little guy and my big guy and eating Cheerios and watching America’s Funniest Home Videos for two days straight. In fact, I’m sure there will be weekends when that happens. However we’ll run out of cereal eventually so there will be a trip to the store on the agenda at some point.
Party on.
We usually spent every other weekend as hermits, more out of necessity than anything. Stephen works from 4am-7pm, Mon-Thu, and enjoys just staying at home to relax most times. Sundays we grocery shop and have one big dinner. Kind of boring, this routine, but it’s great for now, while our kid is still too small to do much.
I’m a weeknight hermit. I break out into hives if I’m not in my owl jammies by 6:30.