I’ve gone back to ballet! After a gap of a decade, it’s mostly all still there in the muscle memory, which is quite nice and reassuring. Suddenly, every bannister and railing is a potential barre again, and I don’t know if Year 11 have noticed my occasional pas-de-bouree as I go up and down the rows of tables during lunch duty.
An hour a week of ballet seems to bring a disproportionate amount of joy in my life. I get to skip the clearing-up evening slot at home (returning just in time for quick good night hugs), and hang out with other women also in roughly my stage of life. It’s great fun jiggling about together whilst our very encouraging teacher showers us in smiles and praise, and I am actually finally making local friends besides the people on my road and at church.
This picture is a surprisingly accurate representation of our current choreography.
Anyway, this has got me thinking about the other moments of joy in our routines at the moment, and they are all worthy of celebration.
Every weekday morning, around 7.15am, a small boy climbs in bed next to me and puts his arms around my neck and says in a sleepy voice, “Mmmmm - I love you, Mum.” Often closely followed by, “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” What’s not to like about that? Gone are the days of being woken by wailing before 5am every morning. What a brilliant way to start the day.
Most weeks, a long-standing friend comes round one day for an hour after school, and generally helps me clean the kitchen whilst we get to speedily catch up on everything happening in our families that week, whilst the boys (who have known each other from birth) revel in each other’s company. What joy there is in a long-standing friendship and just doing life together.
Another day, we have a weekly after-school nerf gun battle with some boys on our road. I don’t do anything beyond send a text to the other mum to say we’re ready, than the boys sort all the rest out, including getting themselves between houses, whilst I get on with exciting things like getting dinner ready or cleaning toilets. This is truly living the dream. They’re even surprisingly great at tidying up at the end, and when I sometimes find the odd missed dart in a plant pot or shoe, it does make me laugh.
Thursday is home group night. Enough said. Except once a month instead of home group we have a whole church meeting and the boys go into a funk because they just love home group so much.
Over dinner each day, we are currently doing the fabulous advent pack put together by Emmanuel Church. Every day a different person does the reading, and then there are activities to do. There is something just so special about knowing we are all doing this little devotional and memory verses together as a church, and we love spotting who is doing that day’s slot and what Christmas jumper they are wearing.
Before bed, we are now doing this hopelessly out-of-date book called, “You can change the world” where we pray for countries and their governments (or what were their governments 30 years ago). I’ve just looked on Amazon for the updated one and it’s £78 plus £10 postage so I’ve decided God can use our out-of-date prayers. But the boys love it; they’re like, “Pleeease can we do one more country tonight?” Because reading about strange things in countries around the world is really very interesting.
Now my mornings are starting at a more civilised time than they used to, I’m back to reading in bed, and the boys keep passing me their books to read, and there have been some lovely ones recently, and then they are happy I can talk to them about the polar bear or whatever they are so enthusiastic about.
I was recently interviewed at a local event, and someone asked something on the lines of, “So, if you work full time, and have three boys, and your husband works long hours, when do you get time just for you?” and I was like, “Errrrrm, sometimes I watch TV whilst I clean the kitchen?” which sounds pretty lame. But actually, whilst doing the dishwasher and packed lunches and stuff, I’ve been catching up on “Handmaid’s Tale” and I love it! Especially Commander Lawrence ("Do you have an irony deficiency?") I love it enough that the kitchen sink is perhaps getting more attention than it normally would.
So there we are – plenty of little happy moments in our typical week.
There’s joy at work too, like getting to know new colleagues better, and I am extremely proud of making a snowman out of books in the library, and there has been some fab new GCSE poetry to get my head round. Also plenty of joy in the run-up to Christmas, like finding bargains on Facebook market place, and big band Christmas music which makes my legs go slow-slow-quick-quick-slow. But they are not routine so they don’t deserve a mention in this particular blog.
More on (not) dancing here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-being-an-ex-dancer and on why life is generally easier now than when the boys were smaller here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-things-getting-easier
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