Day 17 - 22

A lot of little moments have been missed. 

Searching for pink slugs at mount Kaputar, a rain day at the indoor golfie, watching Bluey in the mornings and reading Harry Potter at nights. Football, American and otherwise. Laughing and crying and negotiations surrounding chocolate. All equally lovely. Not exactly inspiring writing. Days 17-19 had plenty of pictures taken, though this blog might suffer for my lack of inspiration in flushing it out. Older me will have to be frustrated here. Sorry, friend. This is harder than it looks.

There was a moment this week that might have marked a bit of a low point, though. For large portions of this trip it's been raining, sometimes a torrential downpour and other times a light drizzle. With only a few true, beautiful days of sun in the twelve day span of rain, I was simply getting tired of being inside. 

I try to find a way to balance my mood, though it's hard when a walk in the sun would simply be enough. Forcing myself to sit down and write doesn't quite do it. A plate of ritz crackers and tasty cheese makes for a delicious breakfast (Tasty cheese is the actual name of Australian cheese, sorta like "genuine leather") but it doesn't lift the spirits for too long. For the second week now, while the gloomy rain keeps me confined to the couch, I find myself scrolling my phone, reading intermittently, and generally finding unrestful ways of passing my time. On Wednesday the rain was so bad, and the flooding was so disruptive, that the boys were kept home from school. Jacki decides to take us out to indoor golf for lunch and a bit of fun.

There are two virtual golf terminals at the Narrabri indoor golf club, right next to each other. We get there fifteen minutes before our booked hour to eat a quick lunch, and very quickly realize that these three children have a lot of energy. It's all pent up. It's not a good fit for golfing, though at least with regular golfing they could use their outside voices and do cartwheels to their next hit. While we finish up our meal and wait for the previous golfers to finish their session, it occurs to me that I am not in a very patient mood. I hate to say this, but at that moment I was feeling quite grumpy.

The folks in terminal one took twenty minutes extra to finish their eighteen holes. I don't know these people, but I assume Jacki does, primarily because Narrabri's Venn diagram of social relationships is just a circle. For this reason I don't speak up. It's egregious though, isn't it? We were supposed to start at 1pm, it's 1:15, and they are still lining up for their shots and putts and selections of clubs. Come on, guy. We have kids here, they're clearly starting to lose their marbles at the wizard golf (???) game that we put on the screen. Give us a little space. We paid for it.

At least they apologized after taking a third of our time away, but I wasn't feeling good about the whole experience. I was calming myself down by housing my entire lunch - a chicken parmesan with fries. I just wanted to play golf, which I suck at, anyway. We start up the game on terminal one while terminal two contains a constant barrage of confusion, close-calls of injury, and short stints of crying. Two year old Lennox alternates between excitement to hit the ball and being entirely indignant at being told to wait his turn. Each time he's asked to swap he throws a tantrum. He's put into time out three times throughout the course of the session. Jacki and I are in sour moods on the drive home, and I take a few hours on the bed afterwords to wind down. I hit quadruple bogey on every hole we managed to play, in case you were asking.

At this point I'm not entirely sure what's getting me down. Theres a bit of a familiar spiral where I consider my aptitude to being around kids - Why can't I just enjoy being in their company? It takes a full day for certain things to click in for me. Rebecca helps immensely with figuring things out, too. It comes down to not being able to match the kids energy, to meet them where they are at. The rain isn't just an absence of vitamin D, which is massive in its own right, it just forces everyone inside. I don't have a lot of energy when I play inside... I play video games inside. The kids aren't allowed to game on weekdays... so where does that leave us? Hanging around watching TV? Card games or board games (not quite their speed, yet) Or chasing them around the house? The rain keeps things muted, dull, unappealing. 

Luckily, the day after (Thursday) was a breath of fresh air. The kids returned to school, Lenny to daycare, and I jumped at the opportunity to get as much sunlight as possible. It completely delivered. I walked for about an hour and a half before heading to the pub for a coffee (promise!) and a bit of time to prepare for a job interview that night at 11pm. That walk was sincerely all I needed. Sun, air, freedom, exercise. The same day at 6 we went back to tennis, a proper workout, and by nighttime I felt like the Uncle Jesse I always wanted to be. Chasing the kids around the house. Upbeat. Friendly. Willing to bullshit around and talk to the kids about any little question they might think about. We're back. It's going to be alright.

Maybe in the future I'll be able to conquer the bad vibes that come with rain. Maybe later in this trip I can write a daily blog with pictures and capture every little moment. Maybe I'll get the job. Right now I'm just catching up, getting my breath, looking for opportunities to get some sun. This weekend we have Minecraft to play, and to watch in the theaters, and to talk about constantly. The world we build together will have to document our time as well as any blog, because that's where I'll be putting my time. And, hopefully, they're going to remember it for a while.