My ideal day would start at 5am.
Prep for lunch today is already done and all I require to do is assemble it and put it in the lunchboxes for the family. Tea gets made and the kids’ milk is ready. Breakfast is simple but nourishing, boiled eggs, scrambled maybe, fried! Yes! Fried eggs - at least my version of it.
Kids wake up and get ready on their first call! Phew! This would drastically make things faster and that much more suspicious. This would make me think that I have forgotten something important. But, faster is better.
Breakfast is finished without a fuss. This is a tough one, they both hate boiled and/or fried eggs. So, if they actually ate and left without any drama, my hackles are up!!
The leave for school without incident. Board the bus on time. Again, no incident on the way down, no arguments, just a coordinated walk to the stop and boarding the bus!! This is definitely going to make me waste the next couple of hours, going through what they may have missed.
I go to the kids room to make the beds and tidy it up, to find that the room is tidied and the beds are made. There is no mess to clean up. Boy oh boy! Now, I really will have to see if these are really my kids. I just may book that DNA test, because someone sure is having an ‘out of the body experience’.
I’m ready and the laundry is done and the kitchen has been tidied up- dishwasher loaded and running and its just 9am. This is the perfect start. And I have had a few of these days in the past six months. And no! I haven’t yet ordered those DNA test kits or tested the food for additives or poisons.
I start my art at 915 am and have everything set up just right around me, the art-board comfortably perched on my lap, my shoulders feeling loose and easy so I know I will probably get a good 4 hours of art done. That’s easily 2 or 3 A3 sheets. I take a break around 1 when the cook walks in and he has the ingredients on hand to prepare dinner and lunch for the next day. No conversations, no discussions, just him working to finish his job and me to complete my lunch.
Post lunch, I have the afternoon free to start working on the computer. This is after I am satisfied with the amount of art I have completed in the morning. My fingers are fine and not hurting, so I actually have some time to finish anything that I feel needs to be completed. The afternoon session lasts about a couple of hours, after which I still have a couple of hours before the kids get back, and I actually spend this time sitting on the couch, reading my book.
Kids get back, they have had an interesting day and are willing to share parts of this with me. They have finished their lunch in school, so this is not the time they are eating out of their lunch box. Conversations at this time are usually fun and full of happy anecdotes that occurred because they had some kind of outdoor activity like PE or Games so they are physically happily exhausted and mentally sufficiently relaxed. These full of life and humorous conversations of who did what and who fell and how they won or how fast they were or how much faster someone else was and of course, usually ends with how unfair something was.
Most often, this is just a time to unwind, for them as well as for me. Discussions are random and spontaneous and on on ideal day like today, any segue into “if you had free time you should have studied” is not the ignition that sets off the temper and irritation. This is also the time when they request to have something to drink, a hot chocolate, or a cold chocolate milk or a banana shake, something to fill the belly without affecting their appetite much.
There is a happy lull when they go about completing assignments or catching up with friends and then we sit down to dinner around 7. I’ve been on an early dinner for a while now, but with all the craziness of their classes and extracurriculars, dinner time has been slowly pushed till almost 915 pm- which for me is very late. I prefer to eat at 7 and go to bed a couple of hours later. The late dinner time, usually ends up being me eating and then crashing immediately after, causing a lot of weight related issues.
So, on an ideal school day, I would love an early dinner and an early, ‘retire to bed’ time that would ensure that I got to spend sometime finishing my catching up with reels and messages and emails and bill payments and stuff so I can fully unwind and then prep mentally for the next day. This is followed by quick goodnights from the kids where they are informed about the breakfast and lunch plans for the following day and there is absolutely no drama from their end.
Wow! TBH, I have had this day a few times over the last few months, so I know that it is a very real possibility. Would love for it to be more often, makes life just that much simpler. Boring! But so streamlined and ordered, like a scene out of the “Truman Show”.
Just a little more 