rest required

I can't blog. My son is doing nothing particularly amusing and I am knackered and stressed and tired of trying to be funny. I'd throw in the towel but every time I try I find myself a few weeks later back at the coal face squeezing out another post about trains or shoes or the cat's breath because I can't help myself. That and my Mum would worry.

There is, in short, no content on this blog. Not that that makes much of a difference to previous weeks, I suppose; I guess I'm just being slightly more honest. Our days pretty much steam into one another at the moment.

I'm finding the night time routine particularly wearing. From the moment I turn off my computer at around 5:30 and go and pick him up from nursery, the pattern of the day is pretty much set until 9 when the frog and I collapse with our dinner. Three and a half immovable, immutable hours are gone out of every waking day. It's like Groundhog Day in miniature; the alarm pops up on my desktop and off we go... I throw in variation because if I didn't it would be so easy for us to have 365 identical evenings.

I may have said this before, but a couple of summers ago I was standing in the park while Charlie amused himself crawling around and I heard a bunch of Mums talking; one of them confessed to the others that she started obsessing over dinner from the moment she woke up every day. At the time I didn't understand but I think I do now to some extent.

It gets relentless, this feeding and cleaning and playing trains and putting to bed business and it's worse because kids resist; they don't want to get on the bedtime travellator, they want to play. Take a kid away from his game and he might cry but within 5 minutes he'll have found something else to play with. Put a kid into an empty room and he will find a way to play. It's wonderful and fabulous and amazing and blah blah blah - and it's exhausting. Sometimes it's just so much easier to say 'fuck dinner and work this evening, let's just play' and on those days the frog comes home around 8 and Charlie and I are lounging around playing mario kart or hide and seek or we're in the garden with the hose. Some days, even, we'll play and play and play and then I'll run a huge bath and we'll both get in and then get into our jammies. Once in a blue moon we'll even get into the big bed with some books and fall asleep. It's kind of a primal thing, this play/sleep business and we are so far removed from it as adults that we pfaff around writing blogs when we should be sleeping and muck about working when we should be spending time playing and then moan inwardly about how exhausted and overworked we are.

Maybe this is what midlife crisis feels like; this urge to get back to play. Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe it's nothing to do with the blog.

Pants.

OK. Sign me up for a red sports car. And a parking spot at the train museum.