Near the end of my pregnancy everyone always told me that I should get as much sleep as I could. That I should store it up for the time after the baby came, as I would experience sleepless nights more horrible than even my giddy, first-time-mom brain could imagine. As if we can create a sleep store for ourselves and draw on it whenever we need it. I’d like forty-five minutes of REM during my afternoon nap, please. As if.
But that’s what I seem to be doing these days. Only, I’m not storing sleep, I’m storing weekends. I recently found out that I’ll be able to do a weekend option at work, which is wonderful in that it includes a premium pay rate but also slightly concerning because I’ll be working seven out of eight weekends in a row and my family time, my me time, heck, even my nap time will all but disappear.
I don’t know if it’s because it’s how the rest of the world works or because I worked in an office for years but weekends have always seemed like a gift to me. A two-day period with no work obligations where you could plan anything from a weekend getaway to an all-night movie marathon and nothing would get in your way. Even now that I work every other weekend I still look forward to Fridays as a night I can truly relax with Chris, watch Fringe, and veg out on the couch.
But lately I’ve been grieving the loss of my weekends. I know that sounds stupid, but how else can I say it? I’ve been savoring each minute of each weekend day, knowing that in less than two weeks my schedule will change and I’ll be giving up my weekends almost completely. I even cried a little over it Sunday night when I realized we won’t get to make a big Sunday dinner together again for eight weeks. I won’t get to take a Saturday-morning nap while Chris does kid-duty for EIGHT WEEKS. Eight weeks suddenly seems like A Very Long Time.
We had a good run, weekends and me. Sleeping in when I was single, going to church on the odd Sunday, visiting Chicago for major holidays. Then later, sleeping in with Chris, going to the gym on Saturday mornings, and running mundane errands together, like to Home Depot or the grocery store. And now, pancake breakfasts with CJ, spur-of-the-moment trips to McDonald’s to play in their PlayPlace, and all of us snuggling in bed together for afternoon nap.
I have, of course, being both a planner and a little bit OCD about my ever-evolving schedule, mapped out the weekends I’ll have off for the next year. We’re already planning big things for my first one, in mid-June. And Chris said we could try our best to make my weekends off special, maybe do some day-trips or even an overnight somewhere. But what I really want to do on those rare weekends off is nothing. I want to spend time with my family, in our house, together. We can sleep in til 11 and watch HGTV and eat our pancake breakfast and cook our big Sunday dinner and sit on the couch and just be. To me, a weekend with no plans would be the best plan of all.
