It was PJ and Milo day at school today. Alice had agonised over what pyjamas to wear all week and Frank couldn’t care less opting to go in school uniform thus pocketing the gold coin donation for himself. I mentioned that he could still give the donation to get a milo but he said it wasn’t worth it because the school milo was ‘trash’. His words not mine. Turns out a life time of drinking milo made in the pot with nothing but full cream milk and 3 to 4 heaped tablespoons of milo has turned our kids into milo snobs.
This was never our intention as parents but milo has been one of the very few things that we’ve been able to embellish on over the last ten years. A small and simple space where we could afford to go above and beyond the weak, tasteless school camp milo we had as kids and make something very sweet and delicious. A real treat.
Finding joy in those small spaces is one of my super powers. Though it was born through necessity it has become a list that I’m constantly trying to add to. I want to turn as many of the small daily rituals I have in my life into meaningful events that I look forward to. It may sound exhausting but the reality is that if I have to do these things anyway then they might as well bring me joy.
Take our morning routine for example. We’ve almost hit the norm-ing phase (storm-ing, form-ing, norm-ing) now that Matt commutes into the city four days a week. Those first few weeks were chaotic (storm-ing). I had kids everywhere and was paying for more before school care than we actually had the kids attend as I tried to figure out the new routine.
The most frustrating part of this time was that I was missing out on having breakfast with the kids. Even when we had HUCX I would get up at 5.30 so I could exercise and have lunches made before the kids got up so we could sit together and have our breakfast. It was just something I really liked to do. When Matt was working from home it was even better because I would get up and exercise while he made the lunches so I could just sit and have breakfast with the kids.
It's taken a hot minute but the solution is that I start work half an hour later (form-ing) so I could do all the things and still have breakie with the kids in a relatively relaxed manner. Fighting for this time (which is exactly what it’s felt like over the last few weeks) means that I get the kids all to myself at the beginning of every day - except on weekends when I get brutally outranked by a Nintendo and iPad.
This small ritual is important to me. We have so much sport and other activities in the evening that it’s getting harder to guarantee everyone's going to be around for dinner - my understanding is that this only gets worse as the kids get older. Breakfast works for us now so I’ll embrace it with both arms. There will come a time when this won’t be the case. That's why I think it’s important to keep cultivating meaning in the small moments.
And not just around the kids either. I’ve been working on being able to ‘relax’ for short periods of time. Having 20 minutes before I have to pick the kids up from afterschool care is a great time to sit and read a chapter of my book or have a cuppa. Normally I’d be rushing but I’ve started to slow down and appreciate the small segments of time we get that can be used for recovery.
It dawned on me some years ago that I couldn’t afford to wait for larger chunks of time for this sort of thing. There was no overseas trip or relaxing vacation on the cards so I had to just work with what I had. Snippets of time are all we get. 20 minutes here or 45 minutes there. It's taken practice to be able to invoke that feeling of calm almost instantly but it's worth it for the chance to relax.
Coincidentally I’ve been reading ‘A Bit on the Side’ by Australian journalist and author Virginia Trioli. It's a beautifully written book that has had me drooling more than once. As the title suggests the book is about what accompanies the main dish. She asks us to focus on the underdog, the sauce, the salad, the side dish that is normally overlooked. Finding joy in the periphery. It's a great reminder that we don’t need to wait for the main event. There might not even be a main event. We get to decide what mundane everyday events we can turn into decadent milo moments.
