Summer weekender

I’m rebelling. The problem with restriction is it makes you kick back against it sooner or later, and I’ve been feeling mutinous of late. It started on Wednesday where, following a pent up after work jog, I came home in desperate need of alternative company. I invited myself over to the Aussie neighbours’ who spent their days drinking tinnies on the patio, where things could quite easily have got out of hand had I not hit a red wine wall at 11 pm. Thursday was spent in contrite recovery, while Friday’s date night with Tom swiftly turned into G and Ts with work colleagues whereupon I wobbled home at 10.30 to cold tom yung soup, red curry and a very patient husband, who’d ordered me everything on the menu that looked GAPs acceptable (I’m pretty much doing the full diet now, mainly because I started to get bored of butternut squash pancakes). By Saturday, and with Field Day happening in my ends (apparently that’s what it’s called these days), it looked as if it was going to be one of ‘those’ weekends, although I know my poor beleaguered body can’t hack it very hard these days. I tried to make Virgin Marys for a friend who’d popped over before heading to the festival, but couldn’t resist adding a slug of vodka, swiftly followed by a cheeky small bottle from the offie with two Pepsi Maxes sat in the exercise park with him and his 25 year old mates afterwards. Oh dear.

Feeling that I really ought to put my responsible hat back on, while feeling really jealous of the carefree irresponsibility of youth, Tom and I decided to head to Reprobate Kate’s school fete, where they serve much posher G and Ts that you get at our local state primary, and carried on with some fairly weak Pimms for good measure, which pretty much took us up to the point where Jonah’d lost his overwhelming social anxiety at being in a school that was not his own, only to have to leave just as he started to enjoy himself, whereupon the whole family plus Kate n’ Lola headed back to the exercise park on the way home where a few festival stragglers could still be found drinking and getting sneakily fined by policeman waiting in a van looking for illicit weed smokers. Half cut on Pimms and sunshine, I taught the kids how to do handstands and cartwheels (what on earth are they teaching them in schools? I don’t know.) We came home for rare breed pork sausage on the BBQ, only to orchestrate a mini festival of our own in the garden.

But for all the video footage of me grinding to the notorious B.I.G with Ava on my back, and busting out my SIA Elastic Heart routine with Kate’s Lola, diluting my red wine with soda and sticking firmly with meat and coleslaw rather than indulging in crusty bread, I don’t half feel stiff and incapacitated this morning, even after some hemp oil, green tea and a shot of coconut kefir. It doesn’t feel fair that I pay so much penance for having a bit of fun, but I do, so I just have to manage. But the key thing is balance, even if a little of what I fancy usually ends up getting me into trouble, one way or another.

I was ready for bed at 10, only semi-hoping the festival goers might return half cut and down to party,  insisting Jonah play me the five chords he now knows on the guitar, and, inspired by an internet meme, I set up a teddy bears’ picnic complete with real breakfast biscuits in the kids’ play room, so that Jonah can convince Ava that the toys come to life when they go to bed. I don’t do enough of that stuff, mainly because my kids are not exactly imaginative sorts, but also partly because I’m usually so busy trying to get things ‘done’  and ‘put stuff away’ that I forget to play. So maybe having one of ‘those’ weekends, every now and again, where I let my hair down, and hang the mess in the morning, really isn’t so bad for everyone, after all.