Top 10 Reasons Summer Can F**k Off

Isy - 14 Sep 16

*Disclaimer. I’m not this miserable all the time, we had no sleep last night thanks to SUMMER*

Summer. It’s all barbecues, picnics, crisp and cool Sauvignon, gorgeous dresses, holidays in Ibiza where the biggest dilemma is what clubs to go to on which night, sunbathing, pools, magnums, pictures in the newspaper of a crammed Brighton beach. Well that’s until you have little people. Yes, I live in Brighton and it’s beautiful here when the sun is out but for all the heavenly beach days I am willing Autumn to come, this is why…

1. Let me start with Magnums. Can’t eat one before 7pm. See already my summer involves way more arbitrary rules than my mates with no kids. If my daughter catches even a fucking sniff of me eating a Magnum she will have a gargantuan tantrum and demand her own magnum, immediately. But I can’t do that because of parent guilt and worrying about sugar and she’s a bit dairy intolerant you see so BLAH no Magnum.

2. Endless ‘going outside’. During the summer months staying inside seems to become some kind of weird, cultish behaviour that only monsters do. Staying inside is basically like saying I’m a fucking misery and I shun the sun and all the happiness it represents. People are all like ‘did you go outside and enjoy the sun?’ Fuck off, I’m 30, I’ve had 30 years of seeing what the sun has to offer. Nobody expects you to go outside and enjoy a thunderstorm which is a lot more captivating. Because of this bloody being outside obsession I now look like a piece of crackling, my hair is white and crispy, my skin like a dull burnt red, beige blodges have taken over my face to the point that I worry I might just be one big beige blodge. Thanks summer, now I’m just a fucking blodge and I can’t even cover it with make up because you slide that off my face within five minutes of applying it.

3. Fucking sun cream. It costs roughly the same amount as two bottles of crap wine but has no enjoyment value (apart from no cancer obviously). I have to apply this six thousand times a day to a child who can not bare to keep still for more than six seconds. Does this sound like fun yet? Oh you’ve gone in the paddling pool, more sun cream, you’ve poured a bottle of water over yourself, more sun cream. Meanwhile, I lose the will to live and forget to put sun cream on myself so spend months looking like a crispy lump of pork rib that’s been discarded from the BBQ and left in the garden to deteriorate.

4. Now for the sun sex and sand holiday. That’s just a NO. If I want to go on holiday I need to spend 1k for some kids club only to discover that yes, my child does still have horrific tantrums in Menorca and the power of the sun has not made her a more reasonable human being. Holidays are reading books on sun loungers, not trying to appease a hot grumpy baby whilst looking at other people reading books on sun loungers. So no.

5. Night time. My daughters room seems to helpfully have its own climate, in the winter it becomes roughly the same temperature as Antartica and during the summer months transforms into Bagdad. Hurrah, another reason my child won’t sleep. Added bonus is that she feels so hot I get paranoid she has a temperature and is getting a bug. Puke.

6. All of the sweat. In the first year of my daughters life I realised parents of small children don’t need coats. It’s because we have these little people who act as a furnace, hanging on to our bodies or making us chase them in circles. What is already a hot day is, in a parent’s temperature gauge, like being fried in a saucepan. For every hot day this year I have resembled a greasy boy band member from the 90’s, with slick hair and an unnervingly shiny forehead.

7. The garden. My garden is shit and I can very well ignore that when it’s cold because we look at it from the windows. When it’s hot and we go in it I am forced to face how shit it is and the nagging thought I should do something about it. Which I don’t want to do because I am still not adult enough to believe gardening should be my responsibility, it still sort of feels like something my mum should be doing for me.

8. Don’t want any more BBQs where my daughter tries to fry herself on the grill. This is not fun it is one long panic attack.

9. Summer holidays. Sometimes I don’t really like bigger kids, some of them throw water over my daughter and shout in her face and I have to fight my urge to shove them because they are children. I like it when they have their place (school) which is utterly segregated from mine.

10. Summer hats, for children. Ha ha ha, what a funny idea, you need to make your child wear a hat at all times but they will immediately remove the hat and constantly attempt to destroy it. What high jinx! At all times of the day when you are ‘outside enjoying the sun’ with your child they will be constantly thinking about how to destroy or get rid of the summer hat. I have no idea why, they just bloody hate them. Dot has thrown FIVE summer hats out of her buggy, when I wasn’t looking, in three weeks.

Isy

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