It's more like standing around piss wet through in little more than underwear, freezing your tatties off while your kids splash around and have fun.
I was so redundant today in the pool, that I had time to find a patch of hair on my knees that I missed with the razor last night. It actually annoyed me more than I thought it would and I imagined everyone else had noticed this patch and were calling me the furry ape mother behind my back.
I'm all for letting them enjoy themselves and have fun times but sometimes I like to join in.
When I take them swimming however, I end up wishing I could give a little crack to the kid that keeps giving me a mouthful of chlorine and dead eyeing the little buggers that brought their 'beach ball' to the pool which keeps curving off and hitting me on the back of the head.
Mine want me to 'watch them' for the 90th time as they display yet another jump into the water - yeh brilliant that shit jump, it was as shit as the 89 before it.
But I clap like a seal and watch again and again, oh and again.
Kids are back at school in a few days and I'm revving up the activity playlist before they do because despite moaning about how annoying they can be 7 days in a row, how expensive days out become and how I never signed up to be a children's entertainer when I entered that maternity ward. The fact remains, you lose them to school, and oddly, you end up missing them a little bit when they're not around.
They become your little mates. Irritating little mates sometimes but still.
So heralding the end of the summer holidays also means time has flown and my return to work beckons. Call me unambitious but the thought isn't filling me with joy.
Before I went off I fully intended to return after 6 months max! I wasn't sure how I would fill my time off. After all, babies don't have many needs do they? The other kids were in a routine of school and nursery and don't need any more attention than that - do they? And no-one needs baths, storytime, trips to the park, the shopping never needs doing, nor the cleaning, then cleaning again 1 hour after cleaning.. I could go on but I won't because I'm boring myself.
What I'm trying to say is, somehow without knowing it, you manage to fill every minute of every day, sometimes without even knowing what you've actually spent every minute of every day doing!
If someone asked me at the end of every day, 'what have you done today?' I think I would stand there gawping open mouthed for around an hour before I managed to remember one thing, 'Erm, I popped to Asda'.
(That 'pop' incidentally took 2 hours and cost £60!)
But somehow, you don't get a minute. Even 'Dickinsons Real Deal' was only on in the background, you didn't manage to sit down with a cuppa and biscuit to watch it solidly, which is a shame because there's something quite engaging about old orange features.
So, my question to me is, how on earth am I ever going to fit work in again, and when I do fit work in, how will I fit the kids in and when I do fit the kids in, how am I going to fit the other stuff in that needs doing? And when I've fit all that in, when will I find time to drink wine and watch Bake Off??
I'm sure it's possible, and I have done it twice before, but now it's thrice and that presents a little more of a challenge.
I totally understand why mums hit a point after having kids where they start to reconsider their whole lives. And we go through that very late in life career crisis.
I might set up a centre for us mums, a centre where we go after having kids to help you work out what you really want to be when you grow up.
Obviously, it would be within school hours and we'd have a TV with Dickinsons Real Deal on in the background.
You'd be served copious amount of tea, coffee and biscuits and before you know it, 4 hours would have passed and you won't have the foggiest what you've done that day.
But... You would have been very busy.
