Thirsty Thursday: I love the holidays - mostly
Sarah McCarthy’s Thirsty Thursday column is brought to you each week thanks to Invercargill-based law firm Mee & Henry Law.
Sarah McCarthy’s Thirsty Thursday column is brought to you each week thanks to Invercargill-based law firm Mee & Henry Law
THIRSTY THURSDAY (nobody likes you when you’re) 23
Week One of the school holidays and I’m still in control of the house and its contents, for now. The big one had friends for a sleepover on Friday night and they watched Indiana Jones and ate lollies and pizza and endless bags of Thai Sweet Chilli Doritos. It took two days to air out the lounge.
Then on the Saturday, high on feeling like I had so far nailed the parenting of a teen, I got sucked in to letting two of his guests stay on for another night and those giant children ate two kilos of potatoes between them and they ate half of a banana loaf between me putting it out on the table and coming back with the butter. It was great.
Last century when I was a young woman, my parents were amazing about opening our home to my friends and I always promised I’d do the same for my boys. Mum would always produce one of her giant spaghetti pizzas, which are nothing at all like the Bill English abomination but instead are a perfectly balanced stomach-liner that my cousins still request when they visit now as big, proper grown-up people.
I have always loved the thought of a giant pack of kids swarming my kitchen like gruff locusts, eating everything in sight and then spilling out again to hoot and holler in the bush and it has mostly lived up to my expectations, other than the fact that my dad would never have allowed himself to be squeezed out of the living room to hide in his bedroom like I was.
Still, I love the holidays - mostly. The lack of timetable and strict getting-up times is always so refreshing for me, although Daylight Savings have been a menace this year as it goes from 8am to 11.30am in 15 minutes, people want fed at 3pm for no apparent reason, then its somehow sixteen hours until bedtime and I’m unable to get to sleep once I get there.
And I thought I was being clever and nostalgic and loaded up on tins and cheese and bread rolls, imagining I’d make retro 80s delicacies for my ravenous children, but when I offered them an iconic spaghetti or corn bun I was met with an incredulous look, as if I’d offered them a raw onion sandwich or asked them to empty the dishwasher.
My youngest’s refrain is that he’s bored as we have let him fry his cerebral cortex, and when I offer a list of things to do (Read! Make something! Tidy your room! Dust the skirting boards!) he rolls his eyes so hard I fear a sprain and then I hear myself say “When I was a girl there were no such things as video games”, which is an immense and scurrilous LIE because we had a ZX Spectrum that was amazing (Manic Miner house down boots), the neighbour girls had a SEGA and also Dad had some kind of incredibly interesting deal going with a guy who supplied arcade games to fish and chip shops, so we had an ever-revolving suite of full-sized, actual, honest-to-god slightly greasy hot dog-scented spacey machines with open coin buckets in the lounge and I had no brothers and sisters to argue with over whose turn it was.
It’s okay, though, because we’re whizzing them to Dunedin for a couple of days at the weekend and if that kid thinks he’s bored now wait ‘til he works out what his dad is talking about when he says Olveston.