The Weekend Surprise

I’m always surprised at how long weekends are. They’re never the length that I think they should be. There are tons of things to do in a weekend. Shopping, seeing family, and relaxing are the things topping our weekend to-do list.

My husband and I only have one car which he drives to work during the week, so on the weekend we pile into it to go grocery shopping. It’s far easier to juggle two wiggly children when there are two people to work as a team. Our two year old loves to sit in a cart and see how many things she can grab before we steer her out of arm’s reach. Our three month old is usually content to hang out in her car seat which we perch on the end of the cart. Once we get them situated in a cart, shopping is the easy part; it’s getting them into the cart and then back into the car with the groceries afterward that’s difficult to do with just one person. When we go shopping on the weekends, we usually go to two or three different places, and it takes us at least half a day.

Our nearest family members live an hour’s drive away (if you don’t hit rush hour traffic). An hour’s drive will put my infant to sleep, and my two year old as well, but only when we are five or so blocks away from our destination. She then feels that this one minute and thirty second nap is sufficient for the day and gets grumpy easily. She doesn’t like to nap at all if our family comes to see us, since she’s too excited about playing or getting her way constantly. (Seriously, try to say no when a two year old looks up at you and says sweetly, “Shall we read a book?” or grabs your hand, demanding, "Play with me! Play with me!") If it’s a family-seeing weekend, an entire day can be taken up with hanging out and/or traveling, and the next with trying to realign my daughter’s sleep schedule.

It doesn’t feel like a weekend unless we get a certain amount of relaxing done. I’m okay with a weekend being over when my husband has been able to sleep in or take a nap, when I have been able to write or play video games for a couple of hours, and when we have been able to take a walk around the neighborhood together as a family.

The weekends that we have tons of stuff to do always end with me wondering “is it really Monday already?” Unfortunately, those weekends happen more often than not, and so I’m always surprised when we finish our required amount of relaxing early so that there’s another whole day to the weekend for more relaxing.

Not that I mind more relaxing. I like being surprised by a longer weekend.