I’m already stressed about next year. Have printed out the school holiday dates and put them onto a calendar. Have mapped out all my projects, highlighted key dates and got a bit of a schedule together.
And I’m trying to dust off a long list of unfinished business from this year: play dates I’ve been promising for months with kindie kids my youngest will most likely never see again; visits to the dentist; the optometrist; the naturopath; booking a holiday …
And then there’s the list of things I know I’ll never really get around to doing, ever, if I’m honest with myself. Like get a personal trainer, lose those goddam five kilos, take up jazz ballet, Pilates, Bikram yoga, write a best-selling novel. Yep, those things might as well go on the list again for next year.
Someone close to me likes to make politically incorrect new-year resolutions. One year he vowed to be rude to everyone, but only from the safety of his car. Another time, his resolution was to be normal for a year, but that didn’t last long. Next year, I’m just hoping he doesn’t buy the vintage caravan he keeps talking about, because then he’ll need a new shed to put it in, and that’s just going to be one big boring conversation.
And next year the youngest starts school, which will be the day I will join a few other friends, who’ve been juggling kids and work and multiple pick-ups for 10 years or so, to open a bottle of Champers at 9am. Tears? I don’t think so. Not from me, anyway. Nope, this will be one small step for her, one big step for me.
And apparently next year, according to my nine-year-old, we’re all becoming vegetarians. I’m not sure if that’s just because she didn’t want to eat her schnitzel last night, but she refused bacon this morning as well, which isn’t a good sign. So now I need to put mung beans and tofu on the list.
Suffice to say I’m really looking forward to trying to find sufficient amounts of nutritional food for a nine-year-old who wants to be a vegetarian but doesn’t actually like eating vegetables. That’s going to be fun.
My friend’s daughter has just become a pescetarian, which means when they came over for a barbecue the other night, which was overtly and fabulously focused on carnivorous offerings, he had to race home to get some fish out of the fridge for her. I offered to thaw out and grill some fish fingers, but that didn’t cut it with the 12-year-old.
Which reminds me; a mate also had a barbecue a few weeks ago and on the invitation she said “kids welcome, no slapping!”. Don’t you just love that a book created by a man who before The Slap was relatively well known and revered but mostly as a gay poet, has had such an impact on our daily conversations and vernacular. I’m so going to miss The Slap on laps at the beach, and the daily lunchtime chats about the TV series and which of the characters we hate the most.
Please, Christos, can we have The Second Slap? And how many LaPaglia brothers are there out there anyway? Wouldn’t mind some more of those, either.