I love Saturdays, with no plans at all

I love busy weekends, but my heart rejoices equally when I know we have a free weekend coming our way. Sundays can be very busy with commitments at church, so I can get a little precious about Saturdays. I love knowing it will just be the four of us, and I find myself double checking that we definitely have nothing else on – not so we can make plans, but so we can do the exact opposite and have no plans at all. We need the chance to regroup and spend some quality time together.

Free Saturdays almost always include parkrun – rain or shine. Jared usually does it because he is really motivated by running with others and wants to improve his time (which happens to be embarrassingly faster than mine). There’s also a duck pond and a park they enjoy, and we have three ‘spots’ we walk to so we can wave at Daddy.  It’s always a bit of mad rush to get out of the house and we never arrive earlier than two minutes before it starts, but I love getting the kids up and dressed to watch all the runners. They’re both strangely silent as they watch it and they don’t really wave when they see Jared – they just stare. Watching their faces makes me laugh out loud to myself.

I love that Win is at the age where we can ask him what he wants to do, because it makes our lives a little easier. When we ask him what he would like to do it usually involves swimming or pond dipping. A couple of Saturdays ago he wanted to go bird watching and I found him looking for loo roll tubes the day before, because he wanted to make some binoculars like one of his uncles. Apparently other essential kit included a bug catcher, a book and no coat. Some days, I’m sure this boy doesn’t need parents! His decisiveness honestly scares me if I think about it too much.

I’ve written lots of times before about Fairburn Ings, but it is somewhere we really love and there is so much to talk about once you’re there. They’ve recently added a den building area and built a look out tower – both of which are hits with the boys. We stumbled across scores of juicy blackberries, which is when the bug catcher came in handy. I felt slightly guilty for carting home so many blackberries, but they were just hanging there screaming to be eaten. Win also announced to one of the workers on the way out that we had a bug catcher full of blackberries (I pretended I didn’t hear), and she didn’t seem to mind!

When we got home Win and I made a blackberry and almond cake, which I didn’t have high hopes for, but actually tasted amazing. I love it when that happens. We have quite a few free Saturdays coming our way…and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Hooray for Saturdays!

E xx