Bored, bored, super bored.....

A big ball of anxiety is gaining momentum as the day approaches. The fear of what lies ahead seems to be building day after day. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we don’t know if we’ll be able to get through it but we must muster the strength from somewhere and face our greatest fears – no, not the impending birth of our fourth child, the school holidays.
Being a working mother, and a work at home mother to boot, the words ‘summer holidays’ strikes fear into my heart, turns my blood cold and brings me out in a nasty rash. A tad dramatic, you might say, but the thought of three little boys ‘helping’ me around my home office makes me hyperventilate.
We barely make it through a weekend with our minds and limbs uncompromised. The two older boys, who are now obsessed with wrestling, seem to spend every waking minute practicing their moves. And I seem to spend an awful amount of precious energy conversing in a loud and angry tone – what some people might otherwise refer to as shouting.
“Stop strangling your brother,” I holler as the middle boy locks his arm around the oldest boy’s neck.
“I’m not strangling him, this is called the Corkscrew Elbow manouvre,” he shouts back. “He’s only after doing the Eye Gouge on me with that wooden spoon, before that he did the Double Backbreaker from the kitchen table. By the way if you’re looking for it the curtain pole from the kitchen window it’s out in the garden. Daniel thought that if we broke it in half we could have Gladiator fights. The curtains are out there too, we made capes from them but they were too long and were slowing us down when they dragged along the ground.”
We are now facing 68 days, that’s 1,632 hours or even 97,920 minutes, if you like, of non-stop bickering and fighting, complains about the lack of facilities, being bored, the weather being rubbish, the distinct lack of sugary substances and the prospect of our house being overrun with other people’s equally bored, equally complainy kids.
When I was a kid we ran around the street in the summer holidays, entertained ourselves and came home at bedtime wrecked. Seemingly they don’t make kids like they used to. Kids these days want to be constantly and expensively entertained. They want computer games and fabulous coloured garden equipment to break.
We don’t have such things in our garden, so my kids swing on the washing line and break the plastic patio furniture by hitting each other with the chairs in heated battles.
One of our neighbours has a strategy in place for when the school’s close. He bought a huge bouncy castle, has spent weeks constructing a wooden adventure centre – it’s not complete yet, it may actually turn out be a wooden cage which I think would be more useful – water slides, fantastic swing sets and football nets. Frankly the guy is making the rest of us look bad with our rubbish plastic slides, our rusty swings and our goalposts made from jumpers. But it’s the rest of us miserable penny-pinching parents who will have the last laugh when every single kid in the neighbourhood congregates in this guy’s totally free mini-version of Disneyland.
Last year, through these very pages, I offered my actual right arm to the Education Minister if she found it in her heart to shorten the school holidays to, say a long weekend in July. I did not include my actual arm in the correspondence but still the woman hasn’t written back. What’s the craic Catriona? Surely an extra right arm would come in tres useful about the Education Department, perhaps for a bit of typing, or for washing windows?
I’m not holding out much hope with her, to be honest. I think she’ll probably just ignore me again. We may just prepare ourselves for the long, hot summer months to come, baton down the hatches, order the tranquiliser darts now and hope for the best.
Check out my blog on www.leonaoneill.blogspot.com.