One Thing or a Mother: Weekends are for relaxing – but not if you have kids!

Of course it’s not. I’ve got kids. No. Weekends for parents are all about entertaining said children, and never has that been more intense than during the 97th lockdown.

You might be shattered but they are full of beans and ready for 48 fun-filled hours with you.

And they had better be fun-filled, or you’re going to hear about it with either many tantrums or a repeated chorus of ‘Mummy, I’m booooooooored’.

First thing’s first: to ensure the weekend is just as your children would like it, you need to get up as early as possible. Preferably don’t even go to bed but if you really must, then aim for 4/5am. If you manage 6am, congratulations, you’ve won the parenting sleep lottery. After 7am and I just don’t believe you.

The second you get downstairs, the children are going to be starving, so you must, I repeat, must have breakfast on the table within 30 seconds.

It should also be noted that whatever you serve them isn’t going to be what they want. Even if it is what they’ve asked for.

Once they’ve thrown half of that on the floor and shovelled the other half into their mouths you need to play with them.

Ideally, play the absolute noisiest game first, just to ensure that if one weary parent has tried to stay in bed beyond dawn that their chances of sleep will be minimal.

In our house, pretending to be a dinosaur and practicing your ‘roars’ works really, really well.

This weekend, I was also instructed to pretend to be a frog, and had to keep leaping between lily pads. Which ageing knees will love.

Once you’ve done that, they’ll be hungry again, so it’ll be time to open the snack buffet. They’ll be regular customers, so I wouldn’t bother closing it. Imagine how much food you can eat in a day, times it by seven, and that should, just about, cover one of them.

Then, it’s time to get out some crafts. Fun! If you’ve ever received Play-Doh as a present for your children, I hate to say it, but the gift-giver must hate you.

But it will be the thing your children most want to do in the world, so you will be their servant, retrieving dough from the contraptions it gets stuck in, while they try to squash as much of it as they can into the fabric of your brand new, ill-advised emerald green velvet dining chairs.

Oh, and I hope you like brown, because that’s the colour you will be left with once they’ve inevitably mixed all the doughs together.

After feeding them – again – why not get out for a walk? But don’t think that necessarily means just putting one foot in front of the other.

On a fairly busy road, my daughter looked up to me and said: ‘Mummy, shall we do the conga?’

Knowing I’d checked my self-respect at the maternity ward door after giving birth to her, I figured I may as well, so the three of us shuffled all the way home, high-kicking legs and all, while constantly repeating the mantra of ‘conga, conga, conga’. My husband was ‘sadly’ unable to join in as ‘somebody needs to push the buggy’.

After yet more food, suggest that it’s time for some calm time before bed. Maybe a movie, or some TV would be good? Wrong! You won’t be able to find anything they both like, so they will inevitably end up running around the house shrieking.

But it’s all part of the fun, right? Life really would be boring without the madness.