We are three weeks into the summer holidays. Halfway through! We’ve been keeping busy with the boys and making the most of our days off and so far it’s been ok. More than ok actually, we’ve had some really good days.
This summer I set myself a little challenge to see how long we could go without going to Macdonalds! The truth is, I have a love/hate relationship with ‘The Big M’. I’m a vegetarian, I think their food is full of crap and the wasteful packaging is an environmental disgrace….but for a long time it was the only place we could take the boys where they would actually eat. It was the first place they ate potato. I’m not sure that we would have ended up where we are now with James eating jacket potatoes with real skins(!!) if we hadn’t had that starting point. It’s not just the food though. No one in Macdonalds gets the arse if your child chucks their food all over the floor. It just gets swept up. It’s also a place we can go in the car when it’s been raining all weekend and we need to get out of the house before we all lose the plot. Sometimes we even do a long drive to far away drive throughs! I’m grateful to have that option and their coffee really hits the spot on those days.
The thing is though, the boys have recently moved forward. They are much more flexible with the food they will eat and we have been enjoying relatively calm behaviour for a few weeks. I realised that we could actually try going somewhere else! In fact, we were in danger of getting stuck in a rut when the boys were ready to move on.
So for the past few weeks I’ve tried to think of other places to try eating out. Nothing really fancy, just a few little cafes where we could go after a walk and have a bowl of chips or a toastie. Charlie has also been going out for a second breakfast with his carers some weeks. Both boys have responded really well to trying new places and it’s been nice to eat real food!
Yesterday, I caved in! We’ve had a lot of late nights and early mornings this week and it was the right day to make the choice to have a local walk and an easy lunch. I think they enjoyed it more because they haven’t had it so much (they did go from respite the other day)!
We will keep moving forwards and leaning towards choosing other places at the times that are right to do that. I’d rather we went elsewhere but I don’t think we will ever give up going to ‘that place’ completely either. Behaviour may set us back again and I don’t want to take away something that the boys enjoy either, there’s not much in life that we can give them as a treat. My days of perfect parenting and trying to be an ‘earth mother health freak super woman’ are long gone – actually I just ate a bar of galaxy for my lunch 😂 The space we have occupied for the past few years is about survival, compromise and ease. Going only once in a whole month sits a lot better with me than going every week though.
So there it is. I will always be on the fence about the place, as much as I want to say they’re baddies, our lives would have been a lot more difficult without them on those rainy days.
Sophie Horsman 