Wake up. Get dressed. Shout at kids to do the same. Feed kids. Shout kids out of the house. Get kids to school. Talk about kids to other mums. Get home. Clear up house because of kids. Do kid admin. Do shopping because kids eat so much. Wash clothes because kids spill so much. Collect kids from school. Talk about kids to other mums. Get home. Feed kids. Argue with kids about screen time. Feed kids again because although they are 7 and 5 they have the stomach capacity of grown men. Shout kids through the bedtime process. Collapse on sofa. Go to bed. Wake up and do it again. Briefly wonder if I am a robot. Surely there is more to life than this?
THERE HAS TO BE MORE TO LIFE THAN THIS!!
Over the last 7 years I have often wished I could get back the independence and freedom of my twenties – not the all-night partying, lack of money and ongoing pretence that I was happy being single – but the adventuring. At 40 it feels like an impossible dream to just up sticks and travel the world. Or at least that is what I’ve always told myself – ‘travelling was your twenties, forties is your family’.
A complicated dream
A few weeks ago it suddenly struck me that it didn’t need to be like that. It’s not impossible to travel the world, it’s just complicated. And if it’s complicated, it’s do-able. So why don’t we just do it? The kids are older now, they don’t need the routine and structure of the baby years. They more or less eat anything as long as we dangle the ‘pudding’ carrot for them and they are used to camping and campervanning. School kind of gets in the way – they might notice if the kids don’t turn up for a year – but there’s home-schooling (uggghhhh, that doesn’t appeal at all). Hmmmm…..
And so here lies the beginning of the journey and the reason I set up a blog. We won’t be going on any global adventures for at least 18 months because I’m guessing it takes a shed-load of planning, but I’m seriously going to look into how we do it and this blog is a mini-commitment to the world that we will be taking a new approach to life and doing something epic and cool with the kids in the next few years. FACT!