I’ve been pondering what makes a weekend these days. When I am working, the weekends usually mean just Sunday since I often have rehearsals or shows on Saturday. And then there are the other typical weekend activities – lessons for the kids, batch cooking, birthday parties, trip downtown to a museum, sometimes even a day trip, football in front of a tv or with friends, social gatherings, church. These are often activities the Husband takes on, ref: stage managers work on Saturdays. (Sometimes I work on Sundays too, but usually I get one or the other off.)
Needless to say most of these activities are now frowned upon. But we did do some “weekend” type things these past two days. We celebrated birthdays: We drove by the houses of two friends whose kids had birthdays this week. We brought noisemakers and percussion instruments and yelled and sang happy birthday and then visited for a little bit – us sitting in our cars, and them standing in their driveway or on their sidewalks.
I took the kids on a walk down our local trail. The County has closed the road next to the trail to traffic on weekends so people can walk on the road, making social distancing along the trail more practical. It had just rained and there were plenty of puddles and mud. “We went on a muddy walk!” the three year old declared.
Husband made a big batch of chili. I get to batch bake/cook during the week, so Saturday was his day in the kitchen.
We went to church – which now means gathering in the basement for the livestream of 9am Mass. We actually “went” twice because there were technical difficulties the first time, so we streamed other services in the morning. But then we decided that we liked the atmosphere of our home church best, and we came back at 2pm when the Church had everything worked out.
We didn’t go out to the theatre, but we did stream the first half of Twelfth Night from London’s National Theatre. Despite working in the arts, I don’t see a whole lot of theatre, so I’ve been loving this series of performances. There is a flexibility and agility to theatre – both the performances and the technical aspects – that I don’t get to necessarily experience in my own work.
We cleaned. I’ve been trying to get the eight year old to clean. She now does bathrooms and windows. Somewhat imperfectly and slowly, but it’s a start. The slowness might be tied to the fact that she gets to listen to an audiobook while she cleans. Then also, on her own, she cleaned her room, including sweeping and vacuuming. When I exclaimed my surprise and delight, she said, “Well, when there is nothing else to do, you can always clean.” Not really my philosophy, but I’m glad it’s hers.
So I guess any one of these things can be done each day, but the weekend was marked by doing all of them. And also the fact that my husband didn’t work. That was nice too. We have certainly been having a lot of family time during the week these days, but I have to say as nebulous as a “weekend” is right now, it still brings on a different quality of family time.