Despite being lockdown, the half-term week has run through our fingers like water. We do feel the absence of family and friends a lot, but we have made our own fun and it’s great to see the two of them so close to each other and playing together except for when they give each other manicures in their bedroom and I have to scrub nail varnish off of the carpet.
We have spent time baking, enjoying the warm weather despite the drizzles of rain and going for walks, visiting the park. I haven’t really missed the shopping town centres at all, even more absent from us this time as I just click onto my phone and order anything we need online. Of course, we have had some sad, attention seeking moments where my children have said they don’t like a particular food which they always love, and stomping upstairs to leave her alone but I’m sure that is all normal.
One of the things I have found about myself is I love to have all of the responsibility. I love to have a plan and a structure to things but children just don’t. They do things at different times in different ways and it is great to know how resilient I can be to change. At work, we call it problem solving, a challenge, an opportunity and in home life, it is usually defined as chaos because we expect everything to run smoothly in the bubble that we control. It is still effective problem solving, having one child who wants to go on the swings, and another who wants to go on the climbing frame at opposite ends of the park requires good negotiation and influencing skills, problem solving and empathy. It’s the same in the workplace when you have two different approaches and a balance of the activity needs to take place.
It’s back to home-schooling this week, the day has started off with rain but we’ve made pancakes and the girls are now having a dance to funky music. It’s fine, before all of this I would’ve felt time conscious as it was delaying the main purpose which is schoolwork, but if I see it as an icebreaker at the beginning of a meeting, or an opportunity to build stakeholder relationships, it definitely improves the mood when we start schoolwork.
Hope all of you have had a great half-term and look forward to the next few weeks whilst the children are still at home and we get them all to ourselves despite all of the challenges of trying to do everything in one space. Keep safe everyone.
Skills Repeat 