There is just a single bank holiday weekend left before my whole family needs to become diurnal again.
In a few days, the kids are back to school after the longest summer holiday in the whole of living memory.
And yes I am aware I say that every year, but this time I’m not even exaggerating.
In fact, I am very much looking forward to the bragging rights when I get old enough to hang around on local Facebook groups complaining about how parents these days don’t know they’re born.
Let’s face it, barring another pandemic, nothing is going to beat the five and a half months we had to stay at home with our children, we weren’t allowed to see grandparents and nothing was open, not even the local park, and you could only leave the house for one hour, once a day, for fricking ages.
But anyway… back to school.
First, there is a two-page email to digest setting out the drop off and pick up rules, what the children are to wear and bring and the measures that the school has put in place in an attempt to ensure that a highly contagious virus won’t be passed around like every other cough, cold, D&V bug, nits and worms already are.
There is of course no way that they can guarantee this because teachers aren’t actually superhuman. If the Government’s garbled messages to the public are anything to go by, I doubt the guidance to schools has been worth the paper it’s written on (and in fact now, I am told, there has been new guidance released just now. On a Friday evening before a bank holiday weekend. My kids are due back on Tuesday. What a bloody shambles they are).
The only thing anyone can know for sure at this point is that we really don’t know anything for sure.
There is little evidence that coronavirus is passed on in school settings.
There's also v little evidence that releasing wild tigers into the house of commons would be dangerous…
— 😷 over your NOSE and mouth (@Tattooed_Mummy) August 20, 2020
We just have to hope for the best and get on with it. With the schools, probably not the tigers, sadly.
The teachers and school leaders are in a shitty situation. They’re right in the firing line and if I know people like I think I know people they’ll have borne the brunt of a lot of people’s lockdown anger.
The new measures won’t please everybody because nothing ever bloody does.
I expect they’re scared of getting ill, they’re scared of getting it wrong, they’re angry at the situation they’re being pushed into and fed up of having useless politicians and stupid Daily Mail readers call them lazy.
I’m not a teacher, though, so this is mere speculation, but if I was, I think I’d probably be a little angry, pissed off and fed up and I wouldn’t be looking forward to skipping in on Tuesday morning with a shitload of sanitiser and a big smile on my face.
I, on the other hand, will be.
After almost half a year of these four walls, very very little alone time, my daughter deciding she can’t sleep before half ten and being woken up every single day (bar three glorious nights recently when they went to my parents for our sanity) obscenely early by my five year old.
It’s been a lot.
I love my family, but they’ve been so there all the time.
For over five months, with no let up, no time to wind down or tidy up. Very little time to work without interruption. No time to do whatever I want to do without small eyes (or my husband) wandering in half way through. No singing in the mirror, no spending an hour doing my make up just to make me feel better only to take it all off again. No swimming, no gym. No time to cry to myself in my bedroom.
And now the end is in sight and yes, at the back of my mind is a bit of a worry.
But I know the school will be trying their absolute best for them and at least if everything goes tits up I should be able to cry in peace occasionally.