Write Now Rebekah

We’ve just had a school holiday in the Netherlands. Two weeks off from school (them) and the evening Dutch course (me).

It wasn’t so much a holiday for me, in the traditional sense of the word. More like a  relentless 12 hour day shift.  In a job where I am enslaved by titchy, belligerent overlords.

I’m not delivering you a moanologue here, but it was a pretty intense couple of weeks.
Fun.
Demanding.
Hilarious.
Challenging.
And poop jokes.
So many butt-poop-wee-bum jokes.

That’d be the 4 year old. Because once. One time. I made the mistake of laughing…and now that is all that comes out of her mouth.

After the first day of non-stop Lego and Barbies, I contemplated micro dosing.
Me.
Or maybe them?
Then I worried about getting it wrong and ending up tripping off my face at the local petting zoo. I’m not sure if I can pull off being on drugs while keeping the smalls alive. Adulting is hard enough for me without falling down a rabbit hole and complicating things… So I decided against it.

Anyway

We all survived. #madememories. And I generally mothered-the-shite out of my kids. Their religious swearing abilities have also stepped up a gear under my careful tutelage. Ooops.

And just like that, the holidays ended, and back to school they went.
Dutch evening course also started.

This meant that, after lunch yesterday, I was panicking that I hadn’t done my homework. It was due that evening.
Great role model to my kids that I am, I was trying to cram 2 weeks of homework in 20 minutes.

In the end, I gave up even pretending I knew what I was doing and got the 6 year old to do it for me. He’s got the best Dutch in the house. He whizzed through it. Dictating it to me. And commenting with brutal honesty on my awful pronunciation.

He pointed out that he,
“Didn’t know why I was going to school anyway, as the Dutch I was learning was stuff he could already do.
And he’s 6.
Surely I should be learning something harder, as I’m so VERY old??”.

Thanks for that son.
Both proud and humiliated at the same time. I headed off to class.

Bittersweet this parenting ride, isn’t it?!

Photo by Raphael Nogueira on Unsplash