Weekends are sacred, and not just for adherents of Abrahamic religions. That precious Friday-evening-through-Sunday space is, for many of us, the only time that we can briefly return to our senses and perhaps remember that we are alive, actually alive. On the weekend you can spend your hours attending to the feel of air on skin and ground under foot. Communing with God(s). Noticing this our only world as if its lifeforms were alien and new.
Or, or, OR... you can hang out with your kids.
We went with option B.
On Saturday, we went with old friends to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. We did NOT go see the Bruegel exhibit, because that's just played out and overrated (by which I mean we couldn't get tickets).
Instead, we saw All the Art in the World Except Bruegel, and let me tell you, our children did not give a flying banana. The field on which their given f***s grow was utterly fallow. They were briefly intrigued by the vast age of Ancient Egyptian artifacts and slightly horrified by the smallness of baby heads sculpted in Rome, but they yawned their way through Ancient Greece, were actively complaining at the Wes Anderson exhibit, and were downright surly by the time we reached the great Italian and Dutch masters. These kids did not care, and may actually hate art for the rest of their lives.
My friend's four year old, who is a hero, bore up stoicly under the strain. My elder daughter looked terribly, terribly sad, held my hand limply and, every gallery or so, would whisper plaintively: "I wish we could sit down, mommy."
The younger daughter actively wept. "I want to go home, mommy," she said, over and over, in tones best suited to a WWII drama. "Please, please let me go home." And when we wouldn't take her home, her skin turned green, her eyes bulged out of their sockets, her head rotated 180 degrees and she crab-walked up the wall while vomiting bile. Something like that, anyway.
The grownups did their very best to absorb culture with appropriate interest, but frankly success was limited, at least for this grumpy grownup. But afterwards, we all agreed we had had a lot of fun!
On Sunday afternoon we bundled the children up like wee turduckens and took them out of the city and into the woods in Purkersdorf. By the time we got there it was about 2pm, which at this time of year means we enjoyed the very last rays of light before sunset. But with the sky a wet eiderdown of clouds, instead of the golden hour we enjoyed more of a freezing, tarnished silver.
We parked in the wrong place. This meant our woodsy adventure actually started with a 15 minute trudge along the end of a country road down a sodden path of mud and leaves, with the air cold and wet and our hands freezing and the children asking if we were ever going to be there yet.
At first, Alex and I tried to keep spirits high for the sake of the pumpkins. But after about the fourth time trying and failing to get the kids excited about something that was in no way remarkable ("Look, girls! I see a bent braaa-aanch!"), I grumped something at Alex who snarked something at me.
It was in this mood, weary bordering on foul, that we finally reached the entrance to the nature reserve. The path in was at a 45 degree angle, consisted entirely of iced-over mud, and spelled utter defeat for our youngest child, all 14 kilos of whom we had to sort of throw up the hill. My stupid shoes were soaked through and I couldn't feel my feet. The snow was ugly, the sky was ugly, the trees were just sad.
This particular park has roomy and fairly wide enclosures for a couple types of local fauna. It being winter, the animals gathered by the fence as we arrived, doubtless hoping for a snack.
"Look, it's a reindeer!" said the Nugget. "Like the kind from Santa!"
"It's a deer," I said grinchily. "A regular old middle European deerus normalus."
"Do we have any apples?" asked the Noodle, her face a picture of precious anticipation.
"Nope," I said. Then I felt like a jerk, so I tried to muster up some cool facts about antlers, since one of the herd had a big pair. Turns out I don't know much about antlers. My children looked small and cold, and one of them said we should just go home.
But we couldn't go home. We hadn't done anything yet. The deer lost interest and wandered away, and we kept plodding uphill and into the park.
I was particularly annoyed because walking in the woods was my stupid idea. Alex suggested ice-skating, but I foolishly said we ought to get away from people and into nature. Well here we were, wet and frozen and miserable, having fun.
And then Alex spotted a fallen tree. We love fallen trees. You can climb them, balance your way down the trunk, pick grubs out of their mulchy ends, lay down on them to stare at the canopy AND--if your pops is Alex and the tree is sufficiently far from the madding crowd--you can even pull down your pants, sit on them with your butt hanging into space, and do your business like the Lord intended.
Something about playing on this tree turned the tide. We started to warm up. We were laughing. And then I remembered that maybe, just maybe, fun isn't about remembering to bring apples, or seeing something amazing, or doing something you've never done before. Maybe fun doesn't come from a store--maybe fun means something a little bit more! And my little cold heart grew three sizes that day. The minute my heart didn't feel quite so tight, I started to relish the weakening light. I stopped being a d***! I started to beam! Everything wasn't as crap as it seemed!
We wandered on down to the wild pig enclosure. The swine showed up in force and smelled pretty unkosher! (I'll stop now). We cooed at the piglets, swung on the swings, met an apparently lost house cat and, when we were basically 10 minutes from dying of exposure, we turned around and trooped all the way back to our car singing "The Ants Go Marching Two by Two" over and over, with everyone (even the Nugget) coming up with lines about what the littlest one was doing ("making a poo! HAHAHAHAHAHA!").
So I have to say, all in all, the weekend was a lot of fun.
The younger daughter actively wept. "I want to go home, mommy," she said, over and over, in tones best suited to a WWII drama. "Please, please let me go home." And when we wouldn't take her home, her skin turned green, her eyes bulged out of their sockets, her head rotated 180 degrees and she crab-walked up the wall while vomiting bile. Something like that, anyway.
The grownups did their very best to absorb culture with appropriate interest, but frankly success was limited, at least for this grumpy grownup. But afterwards, we all agreed we had had a lot of fun!
 |
| This is the gang taking a break from culture, photo courtesy of Dushan the Great, who taught me something super interesting about Vermeer and the camera obscura but my kid was tugging on my sleeve the whole time so I couldn't fully get into it. Thanks anyway, Dushun. And Denia and Mimi and Alex! |
On Sunday afternoon we bundled the children up like wee turduckens and took them out of the city and into the woods in Purkersdorf. By the time we got there it was about 2pm, which at this time of year means we enjoyed the very last rays of light before sunset. But with the sky a wet eiderdown of clouds, instead of the golden hour we enjoyed more of a freezing, tarnished silver.
We parked in the wrong place. This meant our woodsy adventure actually started with a 15 minute trudge along the end of a country road down a sodden path of mud and leaves, with the air cold and wet and our hands freezing and the children asking if we were ever going to be there yet.
At first, Alex and I tried to keep spirits high for the sake of the pumpkins. But after about the fourth time trying and failing to get the kids excited about something that was in no way remarkable ("Look, girls! I see a bent braaa-aanch!"), I grumped something at Alex who snarked something at me.
It was in this mood, weary bordering on foul, that we finally reached the entrance to the nature reserve. The path in was at a 45 degree angle, consisted entirely of iced-over mud, and spelled utter defeat for our youngest child, all 14 kilos of whom we had to sort of throw up the hill. My stupid shoes were soaked through and I couldn't feel my feet. The snow was ugly, the sky was ugly, the trees were just sad.
This particular park has roomy and fairly wide enclosures for a couple types of local fauna. It being winter, the animals gathered by the fence as we arrived, doubtless hoping for a snack.
"Look, it's a reindeer!" said the Nugget. "Like the kind from Santa!"
"It's a deer," I said grinchily. "A regular old middle European deerus normalus."
"Do we have any apples?" asked the Noodle, her face a picture of precious anticipation.
"Nope," I said. Then I felt like a jerk, so I tried to muster up some cool facts about antlers, since one of the herd had a big pair. Turns out I don't know much about antlers. My children looked small and cold, and one of them said we should just go home.
But we couldn't go home. We hadn't done anything yet. The deer lost interest and wandered away, and we kept plodding uphill and into the park.
I was particularly annoyed because walking in the woods was my stupid idea. Alex suggested ice-skating, but I foolishly said we ought to get away from people and into nature. Well here we were, wet and frozen and miserable, having fun.
And then Alex spotted a fallen tree. We love fallen trees. You can climb them, balance your way down the trunk, pick grubs out of their mulchy ends, lay down on them to stare at the canopy AND--if your pops is Alex and the tree is sufficiently far from the madding crowd--you can even pull down your pants, sit on them with your butt hanging into space, and do your business like the Lord intended.
Something about playing on this tree turned the tide. We started to warm up. We were laughing. And then I remembered that maybe, just maybe, fun isn't about remembering to bring apples, or seeing something amazing, or doing something you've never done before. Maybe fun doesn't come from a store--maybe fun means something a little bit more! And my little cold heart grew three sizes that day. The minute my heart didn't feel quite so tight, I started to relish the weakening light. I stopped being a d***! I started to beam! Everything wasn't as crap as it seemed!
We wandered on down to the wild pig enclosure. The swine showed up in force and smelled pretty unkosher! (I'll stop now). We cooed at the piglets, swung on the swings, met an apparently lost house cat and, when we were basically 10 minutes from dying of exposure, we turned around and trooped all the way back to our car singing "The Ants Go Marching Two by Two" over and over, with everyone (even the Nugget) coming up with lines about what the littlest one was doing ("making a poo! HAHAHAHAHAHA!").
So I have to say, all in all, the weekend was a lot of fun.
 |
| The weather was super duper! |
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen