Sunday diary

Day 4 - An exercise in recording a week in my mothering life.
Today was our second Mothers' Day as mothers.

The babies gave L some fingerpaintings they'd done in our Playgroup activity last week. It had a terrible poem with it - one of the dangers of being a pair of critical thinkers is we rarely take things at face value. I hadn't stopped to look at the poem though, being too charmed by the thought of Louis & Pearl's first home made Mothers' Day gifts. However L had to rip it off the fingerpaintings.

The poem went something like (we threw them out so this is the gist):
My dirty little fingerprints I've left on every wall,
The tabletops and benches too, I've really marked them all
So here are some more fingerprints, I made them just for you
Because I love you Mummy, (something, something ooo)

There's a sort of humour that seems particular to mothers, about how much trouble the children are. My mother also sent me a long unfunny Mothers' Day poem about a child who learns about his rights at school and comes home and tells his mother he doesn't have to be hit or sexually abused, so she stops cooking for him and driving him places. Maybe it will seem funnier in years to come, when we're more worn down and having our children doesn't seem such an amazing privilege...does that happen?

We spent the morning at a third birthday party. A lovely things about parenting very young children is how it forces one to slow down. Pearl and Louis get crotchety with being shunted in and out of the car to several destinations, so we tend to go to one place and set up camp for the day. It leads to long leisurely somewhat disrupted conversations, and hours hanging out in parks. In some ways it reminds me of uni, when I might have an hour or two between lectures, and I'd just sit in the grounds with whoever else happened to have the same time off, having conversations that may or may not have been terribly important (boyfriend problems, coming out, rallies against university fees or for nuclear disarmament, which pubs had free nibblies with their happy hours). Of course I could have gone to the library with my hours off, but I don't remember doing that.

In the afternoon we gave each other the perfect Mothers' Day gift: I gave the sadly deprived L some time alone with the babies and she gave me some time alone. Brilliant!

I spent my solitary hours editing my homework for film school. I had to make a video. The only requirements were 1. it needed to be longer than 30 seconds and 2. it needed to have a plot.

So may I present 'The Heist'.