Mrs Woog wrote a great post today about the cost of raising children and the extra-cost of raising extra-curricular children. Hear hear, Woogsy!
The pressure on children and ourselves to be all singing, all dancing, all languages, all sporty, all musical, ‘all rounded’ uber-people is just incredible these days. I have always been very good at bypassing the kindergyming, jumping jacking, bee bop a wop bop todder classes. I just turned a blind eye to those sweet little ballerinas and the cute little boys with footy socks up to their armpits. But when the Tsunamis started school this year I found myself planning the following timetable:
Breathe in.
Mondays – (Maxi) Italian, 3.30pm at school.
Wednesdays – (The Badoo) Kinder dance, 10am / (Maxi) soceer training, 3.30pm at school
Thursdays – (Cappers) Jazz Ballet, 3.30pm at school
Fridays – (Cappers and Maxi) Brightsparks drama and dance, 3.30pm at school
Saturdays – (All) Swimming, 10 am at home / (Maxi and Cappers) Karate, 12 noon up the road / Soccer match, whenever, wherever
I kid you not, I'd even filled out the necessary 28 pages of enrolment forms I was that serious! I quickly came to my senses and talked to the children about what they really, really wanted to do. This eliminated soccer for Maxi before I even finished my sentence. Okay, so we won’t worry about pushing him into the ‘team sports’ thing for the third year in a row. Then I red penned the rest indiscriminately, arriving at the actual Term 1 2011 timetable.
Fridays – (Cappers and Maxi) Brightsparks drama and dance, 3.30pm at school.
Saturdays – (All) Swimming, 10 am at home / (Maxi and Cappers) Karate, 12 noon up the road
Breathe out!
How do you feel about all the extra-curricular activities available these days? Do you put a limit on your children’s activities? How's our taxi driving job working for you?
[Image via weheartit, please let me know if you know the original source.]
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Edit: I wrote this post this morning to publish later in the week; read Woogsy's post in the arvo; edited my post to include a link to her; and then hit 'Publish' instead of 'Draft'. Have you ever done that? So here we are with two posts in a day! And you will note from the date at the top that Blogger thinks it's 9/2 so what's that all about anyway! Ah well, enjoy! x