Today was the school athletics carnival.
If you are a school mum, this should conjure up a good, decent shudder from you, because now you know the kind of day we’ve had.
Tassie broke out the strangely warm weather for us, which normally would be nice – but for a good running carnival, I prefer an air of frostiness with thick coats required. Not only does the cold encourage the children to run faster, in order to warm up, a good coat also provides extra padding for the ground and means that I don’t spend all morning fighting to get my kid to wear a hat.
Needless to say, races were run and presumably, enjoyed. There might have been a little complaining about a lack of ribbons, but “run faster then” was my best response along with “but you had fun, right?”.
And then there were sausages.
The lure of sausages was too great for Isaac, who dragged me down onto the oval, to stand in line at the BBQ stand, in the beating sun, while he wailed that the sausages weren’t happening fast enough. I’m sure that was appreciated by the women cooking.
Then we HAD to find his sister – dodging small children running everywhere and trying not to walk on the running track. Easy when you’re mum – less easy when you’re THREE and OPINIONATED and I NOT WALK THERE.
Finally, we found Amy, handed off her sausage and convinced her to come and sit in the shade with us for a bit.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was trying to drag a small child from one end of the school oval to the other AND up a hill, when he’s hot and tired, and determined that he needed to go in the other direction.
Eventually, after letting him trail behind us screaming, while I cheerily chirped “we’re leaving you behind, Isaac. You’d best walk a little bit, kiddo” to the amusement of the other mothers there (and the consternation of anyone who has a perfectly perfect child who never loses their shit), I picked him up like a sack of potatoes.
This was a brave move on my part, as he was dripping snot and spit by that point, while also waving around a sausage like a greasy stick.
Up the hill we went, with Isaac pretending to have no bones and exercising his vocal chords and Amy pretending to not know us.
Past the fashionistas (who earlier, had had OPINIONS about autism and narrowly avoided having pinecones chucked at their heads – and who also seemed to think that tying a magpie to a clothesline, taming it down and then CUTTING ITS TONGUE IN HALF would enable it to talk. It really does take all kinds…) who tutted at me like I was a terrible mother for letting my child scream and not being sympathetic.
Of course, by that time I had put Isaac down and was poking him in the back to keep him walking, before trying holding him under the arms and prodding him along with my knee. It was not my finest parenting moment, obviously.
Isaac threw himself on our bags sobbing about trees and toilets, before wiping snot all over himself and hiccuping a bit.
This is of course, when he declared he needed to use the toilet.
My son, who is decidedly not toilet trained, due to some medical issues, wanted to go to the freaking toilet, that was all the way up another hill. Nathan had gone in search of more sausages, and so I was entirely without backup, or anyone to watch our bags.
Trusting that the fashionistas in front of us would be too grossed out by the snotty tissues and general aura of Real Motherhood surrounding our bags, I figured that they wouldn’t nick my kindle and trudged up the hill, to take my son to the toilet, whereupon, NOTHING HAPPENED.
Are you surprised?
Eventually, after another meltdown over slide privileges and assorted nonsense (MY HANDS ARE DIIIIRITY), we elected to cut and run, stealing our daughter in the process.
Sure, she had another race to run, but by that point, we did not care.
Hot and miserable, we made our way to the car and the comfort of air conditioning, before declaring that Athletics Carnivals are obviously designed merely to torture as many people as possible in as little time as possible.
I am not the kind of parent who cheers on the sidelines – no. Instead I am looking at my watch, wondering when I can leave.
Not my finest parenting, at all.
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