Are We Nearly There Yet?

Sep 20 2012 3:18PM

The end of the summer holidays.

I have taken a break from blogging over the summer holidays. Frankly, just getting through the almost seven week holidayathon is as much as I can manage and in the time it takes to type in the password into my laptop a fight will have broken out, a child will have shut the cat in a drawer and another child will be stood over me screaming 'Mum mum mum mum mum'. So I have been digitally absent.

Hard though the holidays have been, I was fearing they would be catastrophic. I was dreading the swearing and shouting, the breaking and throwing, the fighting and arguing. Getting through a weekend of this is bad enough. Seven weeks is a serious endurance event, with no medals at the end.

However.

At the end of the summer term, something quite magic happened. Son no. 1 received some painful and difficult therapy. He got into the car after the therapy session and remained pleasant for the entire journey to collect his sister from school. He was pleasant to his sister, he was calm and lovely all weekend. DH and I remained on edge, primed for the next fightathon. But son no. 1 coped well with the last week at school and was reported to be 'a joy to spend time with'. The holidays started, usually a flashpoint, and he remained calm and happy. I started to relax, a little. We went on holiday to France. There was lots of travelling involved, it was bound to be awful. But apart from a couple of incidents he was in the main part calm and happy. I read four novels. I haven't been able to read on holiday for eight years. DH and I relaxed a bit more.

We are now limping through the last few days before the start of the autumn term. We are both feeling under the weather with something vague and tiring. The past eighteen months have been very very hard and are catching up with us.

I don't know what the next year will bring and I'm not quite ready to think about it. But we've survived another summer holiday. Now surely it must be time to go back to school.

As always there is more content and comments on my website http://www.sallydonovan.net/ Thanks for reading.

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