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Now that I work more-or-less full time these days, plus have Sabrina to look after- it feels like the weekends become more and more important. They are the time to rest and catch up on the sleep. The time to do fun things with Sabrina and Tai. The time to catch up with extended family and friends. The time to do something for myself, catch a breather and figure out where I am at. But also the time to get all the housework done- cleaning, washing, dishes, gardening, mowing, supermarket shopping, errands.
But a weekend can never be long enough to do all those things. I can pick and choose, skip things one week and then try to prioritise them the next weekend, etc. But then with that always comes the guilt that tasks aren't done often enough, that I'm being too lazy, not being a good enough wife, Mum, human being.
The pressure that then puts to make the weekends this perfect time of achieving a million goals is too much, making me more likely to feel overwhelmed and get even less done, and then feel even more guilty about it. Ironically, then it actually feels a relief when I go back to work on Monday, as the working week feels like more of a restful time than the weekends do.
Hmmm. I think at some point I may have missed the point of why we have weekends.
So, as you can probably guess, right now it is a weekend. Specifically it is Sunday afternoon. It's a sunny, beautiful day. Warm when I'm in the sun or moving around, chilly when I'm sitting around inside.
We haven't had a lot of sunshine lately, or at least the sunny periods have been brief and intermittent. We've had some crazy heavy rain in the last few weeks, plus thunder and lightning, hail, and one day when I stayed home to work instead of going into the office purely because I was worried the Hutt River was going to flood and I would get stuck in Wellington, unable to get home.
Taina and Sabrina have gone to the park to have a play. I feel they often don't get quality time together. When we're all at home, usually Sabrina just wants to play and make a mess, and Tai wants to plan D&D stuff or watch TV and not have to deal with Sabrina's mess and general crazy kid antics. So he gets annoyed at her a lot. I think it's important for them to do things like this, go to the park or do something fun out of the house, just the two of them, so that Tai remembers that he actually adores his daughter and actually enjoys her company, when he is not obsessively burying himself in D&D stuff.
I tend to be a lot better at not losing my temper at Sabrina and talking through problems calmly with her. I even like playing games, or doing colouring-in with her sometimes. My biggest challenges with her are she wants me to do a lot of physical games a lot, running around, hide-and-seek etc, and I just don't have the energy most of the time. Maybe it's partly because I am overweight and unfit, maybe it's partly fatigue from working, and running the household etc. Maybe it's also because I am only a year-and-a-bit away from reaching the big 4-0, so I'm not exactly a spring chicken as they say.
I have a few reasons to feel really positive right now though. Money is not as tight as it used to be (although I still struggle with making my monthly pay last all month), because I am working almost full time (about 35 hours a week). Sabrina is at school now, plus we've started trialling out taking her to after-school care a couple of times a week too. So far she enjoys it.
Work is good, I'm learning and getting so much more confident now that I'm working more hours. Plus a few staff have left our team and not been replaced, so now our team is about half the size, so I've been making the most of the opportunities to step up and take initiative on things more to take the weight off my manager's shoulders a bit.
I joined a gym not long ago. Haven't gone much, mostly because I booked a free PT session to get familiar with the equipment etc, but then he got sick and cancelled my session, and it never got rebooked, so I put the gym on the backburner. I really need to get on to that though.
Oh, and a big one: we moved house earlier in the year.
You see, my brother Nick owns the house that is right next door to the one we grew up in. Years ago, after Mum died, but before Dad and Jill got together, Dad and Nick were living in our old family home, when the house next door got put on the market.
Nick had some savings, and had been considering buying a property, so he went ahead and bought it. For a short while, it was very strange, Nick living there, and Dad living next door.
Then Nick decided to move over to London, and has been living there ever since. So he leased out the house. At the time this started, me and Taina had only recently moved out to Porirua, and Tai had started his IT course out there, so we weren't really considering moving back to Upper Hutt.
So the house was being rented out for several years. During that time, Dad and Jill got together, got married, sold the old family home and bought a new place a couple of streets away. Nick got settled in London and met his partner Aimee, so he wasn't planning on moving back into the house. Taina finished studying, we had Sabrina, and moved back to Upper Hutt to be closer to family while Sabrina was little.
At the beginning of this year, Nick's tenants announced they were moving out. Nick had been already talking to me about whether we would be interested in living in his house, because if he was renting to us he wouldn't need to bother with paying property managers to look after the house and deal with the tenants.
So when the tenants moved out, we moved in here. In answer to the questions I know you are asking: yes, it is super strange being right next door to my childhood home, and yes, the fact that the people living there now are strangers makes it extra weird. Yes, the first several times I drove home to the new house I almost pulled in to next door's driveway by mistake.
But also, there are some great things about our new home. The lounge has a conservatory area, that gets lots of sun, so the lounge is lovely and warm on a sunny day.
The house in general is warmer, dryer and less prone to mould than our previous place. Much less lawn to mow, so we mow it ourselves with Dad's old handmower rather than paying for a mowing service.
The house has a sleepout at the back, with its own bathroom and kitchen, neither of which we use much, but it's great for storage. In general, the sleepout has been used primarily for storage so far, but I'd love to get a couch and chairs, maybe a TV in there so we can hang out there, maybe use it as a games room.
So overall I've been feeling quite positive about things, I like my home, I like my job, Sabrina is doing well at school and is happy there, Tai is happy with his job which is wonderful because he's never really liked most of his previous jobs. He's really into D&D lately, and is the dungeon master for a couple of different campaigns: one with some friends, and one with some work colleagues. I love that he's passionate about it, but I really wish I could tear him away from it a bit more often: just so we can spend more time together as a couple, and also so he can help a bit more with housework and errands. That said, he did do the dishes today.
Anyhoo, time is marching on, so I might get some sunshine before the sun goes down, and enjoy my brief alone time before I pick up the family.
At this rate, I will probably see you again sometime around New Years. Bye!
 weezieishness · Sun Sep 08, 2024 @ 05:21am · 0 Comments |
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