The Simple Things

Well I am truly a gal of simple pleasures these days....

I don't know if it is a getting older kind of thing, maybe getting wiser...my kids might contest that point....maybe it is just getting more comfortable in your own shoes so you just worry less about the unimportant things.

It is of course school holidays - a living nightmare for some parents!

I have always been pretty lucky, when the boys were younger, their Dad being a teacher got to be home with them all the time! I didn't go back to more than 15 hours a week work til they were school age so we were home together a lot of the time. As they grew older I was back full time and still only had 4 weeks of leave to share with them each year.

Over the last 5 or so years, having become part of the school based employee club, I now get school holidays too!!! Oh how quickly I adapted to all that extra time off I can tell you.

It has been such a great thing. I am now mum's taxi to two teenage boys to and from school every day. Of course we get there earlier than their mates and leave after them too, but it gives extra time for homework or getting access to the classroom first thing in the morning to get that book you forgot but need in order to do your homework : - )

What it has brought is a lot of time to just hang with my boys. In this totally crazy world where life flies by and you wonder where the years have gone, this time to just hang is the most precious thing of all. Time spent in the car could be conversations of events of the day, or it could be silence as I drive, one sits and thinks to himself, the other attempts to blow his eardrums to pieces with Metallica blaring through the ear pieces of his mp4 player. One of our most favourite things to do on the drive home is to tune into Hamish and Andy. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) the boys and I share the same sense of humour. Many a time we have driven home from school in stitches of laughter, and just when we manage to compose ourselves Hamish starts laughing and his infectious laugh starts us all off again! Or the days when a voice from behind me says "Mum can you just take a breath, and stop laughing. You are the driver, you need to focus on the road!" We have tried to share our stories with hubby and father when we arrive home, to no avail, it seems it is one of those "had to be there" kind of things.

I now know who their closest friends are, who the kids that drive them nuts because they act like morons are, which girls are part of the "in crowd" and which girls are just blah! Like I said time spent with them is so precious.

We have really been truly blessed by 2 gorgeous boys, well they will always be boys to me, but at almost 16 and 14, they are in fact on the verge of being young men. The 15 months between them (no of course it wasn't planned that way!!!!) has been brilliant because they get on so well together. Very rarely they have a spat but it is usually because one or the other is over tired or stressed and worried about something. As a general rule they are tight as, they hang out together and actually genuinely enjoy each others company. Yet for all their compatibility, they are in fact very different personalities. One is the confident, assertive, outgoing academic, loves school, loves learning, loves writing pages and pages...the other is much less confident, very hands on, loves the technical and the doing, loathes the writing, loves music and is quite a gifted guitar player.

So this weekend has been time spent with my most gorgeous boys. My guitarist has taken to downloading music off the net and teaching himself things to play. I love that he is so passionate about things and so keen to teach himself new things. When he plays and practices, I praise him on the good job that he is doing, whilst silently despairing that if I hear that same Metallica song played again and again for another hour I may well garrotte myself on the closest spare string I can find!

Then out of the blue yesterday Master 16 decided it was time to reclaim the table tennis table. It has for some months now been wearing a fetching green artificial lawn carpet which was of course home to the battlezone for Warhammer - a strategy game involving self assembled models, which is very popular with teen boys.

Thus we had the task of remembering just where were put the bats, the balls and the nets - which we found with surprising ease - hey gotta be lucky sometimes right.

The boys spent some time hanging out playing against each other, and all we could hear from inside was friendly sledging and copious amounts of laughter. When they asked us to come out to play, I realised that their friendly playing was in fact, time spent getting their eye in and rhythm back so that they might whip the asses of their parents! For awhile it worked too.

So last night, a swinging Saturday night in our household, was spent outside on the patio playing table tennis, just the 4 of us. It was just the best thing! We didn't talk about the problems of the world or how to solve them. We didn't grill the boys about where they had been or what they were doing or if they were taking drugs? No, we were just simply being together, enjoying each others company, sharing the fun and laughter of a family game of table tennis.

Yep the simplest things in life are truly the best.....