School holidays... again

Time is a curiously elastic commodity. One minute it’s flying by so quickly you don’t even notice it’s passing, the next it draws out into what seems an eternity. Have you ever looked at the clock, thought you had plenty of time to do whatever it is you needed to get done, only to glance up at it again a few moments later to find all of that time had evaporated?

It happens to me… a lot. Time, in our house, compresses and expands with gleeful abandon. Take this morning for example. This morning started off normally enough, time seemed to be behaving itself. Then the children started “playing” with a bit too much exuberance, time compressed and in the blink of an eye I lost a couple of hours. Suddenly it was lunchtime.

Take an arbitrary period of time… let’s say two weeks. If you were off on your holidays for two weeks, and were set to leave in exactly two weeks you can guarantee that the fortnight before you travel will drag on interminably, while your two weeks in the sun will veritably fly by. You’ll be home again almost before you realise you’ve been away. That’s time playing it’s “funny” little games again.

Two weeks, funnily enough, is exactly the amount of time the girls have off school for the Easter holidays. We’re right at the beginning of it at the moment… and from where I’m sitting it promises to be an awfully long two weeks. It’s great to have the girls home all day – but when you work from home it can present something of a challenge. Normally it’s not a problem – I simply do less work and spend more time with them. But that can’t happen this time. With a big deadline looming, the prospect of taking much time off work is slim at best.

I’m not terribly good at putting work before my family… never have been, and truth be told, never want to be. If success, at work or anywhere else, means the single minded pursuit of your chosen goal at the expense of everything else… then I wish you every success. Me, I’d rather put my family first.

Only this time I really do have to work. The trouble is, it’s difficult to concentrate with the little one climbing into your lap pretending to be a puppy and the twins screaming blue murder in the other room. Sometimes it seems that fighting is their default state. They fight all the time about everything from who’s first to brush their teeth, to what DVD they’re going to watch, to how they’re going to approach the latest art project and a million-and-one other things; all day; every day. It’s exhausting.

The only time they seem to stop fighting is when one of us try to intervene. Suddenly presented with a common enemy they close ranks and direct their combined vitriol in our direction. Sometimes I think it’s better to just leave them to it… but there are times when you just have to intervene.

Yes, the elasticity of time is an amazing phenomenon – and never more so than when the children are on their school holidays. Hours can zip by in what seems like minutes, whole days can disappear into the black hole of the temporal labyrinth, and yet the two weeks drags on… and on… and on.

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