The summer holiday is over and while Madeleine and her dad were a bit reluctant to pick things up from where they had left off, I was slightly more ready to go back to reality. “That’s because your reality is not a 9 to 5-job”, some of you might observe and although that certainly helps, so does the fact that we’re going to Bucharest for a week in September. And that the kindergarten is open again. Because let’s face it, with the risk of being overly blunt, we, the parents of cute, fussy and energetic three years olds, should be awarded a medal for having spent a whole month together with our offspring with not so much as an hour to ourselves. 😉
I’m not going to have a rant on how I and my brother would spend 2 and a half months with our grandparents in the country side and only 2 weeks with our own parents back when I was growing up, because that was a different world altogether and I wouldn’t want that for my girl (not because the grandparents weren’t grand, but because we always missed our parents so much). However, raising a child between the two of us, with the only help of a hired couple of hands three to four times a year is more draining than I would ever have imagined. And it’s not because our daughter isn’t the biggest blessing we’ve ever been given. It’s because parenthood never ceases to demand something of you. Not even at night.
Aside from the feeling of being plugged in 24/7, it was truly good to think of little else than what to have for breakfast, whether it’s too sunny or too cloudy for the beach, if Madde should get an ice-cream “right now” or if we should save it for later. You know, the grown-up stuff. Doesn’t that crack you up? Or maybe you can’t relate- you see, I usually go to work on an empty stomach, I’ll have ice-cream for lunch if I feel like it, left-over pizza for breakfast if I should be so lucky as to stumble over it on the kitchen counter, if someone cancels on me I end up being more disappointed than my daughter and I’m the grown-up!
Speaking of grown-up stuff, we managed one big deed this summer, we weaned Madeleine off the pacifier! Well done to us! In fact, had I known it would be that simple, I would have thrown the damned thing away a year ago! We didn’t even go through with our plan, here we were, going to a zoo, supposed to hand the pacifier to the lion, but when we got there, it dawned on us that the zoo was huge and it was hot enough to scald a lizard and Madeleine was too tired to care about the animals altogether. And so we ended up forgetting the whole thing. But then came the night and I simply told her I’d given the pacifier to the zebra. She moaned a bit, but that was it.
But let me tell you more about the heroine of this holiday. Madeleine talked incessantly- of her own nail polish, of other people’s nail polish, about the Merry-go-round, about all the ice-cream she’d eaten and the one still waiting for her, about how she’d play at the beach and about how she’d be baking gingerbread come Christmas. She sang to herself (and out loud), she drew and colored, skipped and ran. She wrote off the art museums as “fake museums” from the very beginning, noting that “the real ones had animals”. It made me laugh. I’ve trained myself to like art museums for an hour or so, that being the line where my attention span runs out. I like them as in I’d rather be visiting a museum than being exposed to crowds, the heat or the playground. But what I like best is doing absolutely nothing. As in a big pile of nothing with a book in my lap and a giant beer in front of me. And you rarely get to do that as a parent. 😉
At the beach, the towel was a kite and Madeleine chased us around, splashing water when she caught up, laughing with her mouth open. We would build sand castles, pick shells and jump waves and my girl entertained herself by tearing down fortresses, emptying cups of water on her mom’s bum and eating watermelon, red juice dripping down her stomach, staining the sand.
Back in Oslo, the weather is crappy. Looking around, the grey skies hang down heavy on us, people go about their business with a dreary expression on their face. My Italian neighbor was chirping cheerfully the other day, telling me she’d spent her holiday in Larvik- “the weather was shifty, but at least I dodged the heat wave”. Another neighbor, a Montenegrin, spoke softly about having had “a proper summer” back home, no cloud in sight, the sea flickering blue. In the evenings, the dark silence was only pierced by the crickets going tsss-tss-tsss. A few meters back, his Norwegian wife shook her head and conceded that “the Mediterranean life style of staying inside for 5 hours midday with closed shutters” only felt oppressive to her Scandinavian disposition. So it’s all nostalgia?
I don’t know. I myself only long for the sun. For long, sunny, carefree days. But for now at least I can hear myself think again.
xxx, Alina