Sunday Afternoons

I think I've written before about how insular my children are - given the choice between playing with friends and playing amongst themselves, they nearly always choose to play amongst themselves. When it comes time to picking sides for teams, or roommates for school camps, they'll nearly always look to one another as a 'safe' option. It's not that they don't have external friends, they do - it's just that they take great comfort in 'better the devil you know' and so will often choose each other. I've recently discovered how this attitude actually extends to us as a family as a whole. We can be quite an insular little unit. I would consider myself a fairly social person, I like getting out and about, hanging out with my friends, inviting people over for events and just for the heck of it. My kids also like getting out and about for all of the same types of things - and considering the number of activities we seem to have gotten ourselves into, we all spend more time out of the house than we do IN it.

On Saturdays all five of us are out and about at our work and social activities - so much so that every Friday night, DH and I sit down with pen and paper and work out the logistics of which kids, which adults, and which cakes need to go where and when (times like those I'm glad he is an engineer with an excellent working knowledge of Melbourne suburbs.) As a result, our insular-ness really only has a chance to reveal itself on Sundays.

Maybe this is why we're like this- once we finally get to spend some time at home, we don't really want to go anywhere, nor do we want to be bothered by other people. It's not unusual for a friend to call and invite my kids around on a weekend, only for my kid to shrug and say, "Nah. No thanks. I'd rather just be home." If I've got various errands to run, I usually prefer to have some company and so will invite anyone who wants to come with me- but all three of my kids have been known to say, "Yeah, you go, Mum. We'll be here," and shove me out the door (and I've tried bribery, with mixed success.) It's quite the interesting phenomenon. We all just seem to be very content within our home, and once Friday night rolls around it's as though we draw down the shutters bit by bit until by Sunday, the moat is dry, the drawbridge is up, and the place looks as though it's been abandoned for a hundred years.
 
I realised we had this insular nature when I again found myself with the time to sit with the papers and a cup of tea at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, in a house that was very quiet and yet very full of people. Sunday afternoons have become our unspoken hermit afternoons, where being a hermit means the five of us just hang out together in different parts of the house enjoying some winding-down time before the madness of the week hits us again.  I'm pretty sure wild horses (and the combined forces of George Clooney, Selena Gomez, a good looking female greyhound and some hot babe in a bikini) could not draw any of us out of our little cocoon of Sunday warmth.

I find myself looking forward to Sunday afternoons. Sundays have become my favourite part of the week, when I have all the things I value closest to me - my DH, my kids, words in some form or another, food, endless cups of tea and vast quantities of joy and comfort.  Anyone or anything not on that list, please kindly fuck off until Monday morning.