Time

 It seems such a long time since I wrote my last blog. I could check and tell you exactly how many days, hours, minutes it has been since I last published something. Or I could instead use the concept of how many teeth have exploded through, how many runny nappies I have changed or how many walking stacks I have witnessed. However you want to measure it I know the time which I have spent since the last blog was written has definitely been busy.

About the time (more time – there’s a specific theme here!) I wrote my last blog one of my teaching colleagues sent me a text and said we should get our boys together for a play while we drink coffee during the holidays. I replied to him “When are holidays? I have no idea anymore.”

When I was teaching I would be able to tell you exactly when holidays were coming up - as could all teachers I’m sure. Some colleagues would even have the days, hours, minutes counting in their heads!

The big thing which made me twig holidays were coming up was the fact that both H and I started to get sick. At the end of a term kids and teachers get sick, both illness wise and also perhaps a little sick of each other! Holidays are therefore, a great opportunity to refresh the body and mind ready for the next school term. What I realised was I wasn’t going to get a holiday after 11 or however many weeks it was to recharge my batteries. This left me feeling jealous of my schoolteacher colleagues for the first time all year. I suppose I felt like many others who see teachers having regular holidays. Yet when I think of all the hard work teachers do during the term I know they fully deserve their holiday break because coming back refreshed helps them be better learners and teachers.

The concept of time that I live with has changed somewhat this year. No longer do I worry so much about how many weeks, days or minutes there are – these arbitrary measurements we have introduced don’t seem as important. Life is measured more now by H and the way that he has grown and changed. In the last few weeks he has had his first couple of cases of a dodgy tummy, his first ear infection and, for want of a better term, an explosion of teeth in his mouth. He has started to walk which means he has started to stack it more as he develops his confidence. He has started to use a spoon and try and eat his own dinner, although the ‘natural spoon’ (his cupped hand) is still his favourite. There are so many things I could measure the growth of my son with outside our normal assumptions of time. These make it so much easier to enjoy the moment and see the change as he grows exponentially between meals and sleeps.

As time passes and my son grows I know I have to enjoy every milestone and not get caught up in the year, month, day, hour, minute or second of when it happened. I’m not going to get the time again to enjoy it as much as I am now so I’ll just have to make the most of it – unless of course I take a crash course in Gallifreyan and become a Time Lord like Dr Who. Then it would be back to the beginning or somewhere in between!