When they were younger, I used to worry a little that my kids didn’t do enough in the way of extra curricular activities.
Even as toddlers, it seemed like all the other kids we knew were doing swimming, ballet, football, archery, paragliding or whatever on a Saturday morning; meanwhile I was sticking mine in front of CBeebies and trying desperately and unsuccessfully to stay in bed.
Such happy memories.
I’ve written about how I was conned into paying fourteen bloody quid for a twenty minute swimming lesson when my oldest child was pretty much still a foetus. It might actually have been less than £14 but that’s what my memory is telling me and the fact that there are no bloody prices online at all lead me to believe that it’s probably not far off.
I feel like a right idiot for falling for that at the time, but now they’re a little older I’ve relented and I no longer see organised activities as merely pissing money away. Time, perhaps, but not money.
It’s exercise, new skills, friendship… All that kind of stuff. Important stuff.
Consequently a lot of my life seems to be spent taxiing the kids about and sitting on hard seats, feeling my life slowly ebbing away as I watch them get told off for not paying attention and chatting (cannot imagine where that comes from).
There are two types of kids when it comes to after school clubs.
There are the ones that are super keen and love every moment.
This is my daughter.
She sees every new activity as an opportunity to make friends and have fun. She loves dancing, she loves swimming, she loves drama and she’s always full of energy and raring to go (I genuinely cannot imagine where that comes from).
She loves a challenge and will never give up; when she moved up a class at dancing with the bigger girls, and she didn’t know what she was doing, she was really shy and I was worried she wouldn’t want to go back. At the end of the lesson she said ‘It’s OK mummy. You can’t be good at everything straight away, I just need to practise’ which I’m sure must have been plagiarised straight off a kids’ Netflix series, but it absolutely floored me; being out-matured by a then-five year old.
She has kept practising, and she’s getting really quite good at it, as well as swimming, drama and everything else she puts her mind to.
In fact before next year, we are going to have to scale down her clubs before she bankrupts us and the stress drives me crazy.
… And then there are the other ones.
The ones that after a few sessions decide that actually they don’t want to go, that whinge and complain and kick off and say they’re going to DIE if they have to go swimming. DIE. DEAD.
That’s my son.
Honestly, the thrill that you can experience by physically dragging your child out of the house in freezing temperatures so that you can drive them against their will to an after school club that they’ve decided they don’t want to do anymore and spend an hour of your life on an uncomfortable chair trying to look interested is virtually unrivalled.
Doing something you don’t want to do for someone who doesn’t want to do it either? Smashing stuff.
AND you get to pay (dearly, usually, in one chunk at at the start of term) for the privilege.
But goddammit once I have paid, you can be damn sure we’re going and I’m going to sit on that stupid uncomfortable chair and suffer whether anyone actually wants to be there or not.
It’s what I like to call character building for everyone involved.
And just eight more paid-up weeks to go!
😂😂 my son is like your daughter. He has kickboxing, swimming, dance, scouts, football training and football matches. He wants to do cricket, hockey and archery I literally can’t fit it all in nor make money stretch that much. My hubby hates almost all sport so muggins here ends up with the short straw and has to stay at every training and football match while he swans off home then comes back to pick us up.