Told to toddle off for the summer

I’m depressed. I know I’ve just come back from two weeks sunning myself on the Costa del Essex and I know it wasn’t just any old holiday but my honeymoon.

I know weddings are the best day of your life so I know that I’m going to be feeling a little blue after that. I also know that it’s pouring down with rain again and that we’re nearly through our official summertime . . . but it’s not any of that.

No, it’s toddler groups. Those lovely little places where all the mums get to eat white toast and drink cheap tea and where all the children are officially allowed to run amuck, “no biting and hitting allowed.”

It’s these oases that are making me depressed. It’s not that I’m spending too much time in them it’s that I’m spending too much time out of them.

During school holidays when the big children get to laze about for six weeks, us mums with our little ones have no group to go to.

They shut them down. All of them. Gone, in one fell swoop. It is, bar none, the most depressing time of the year. The thinking behind it you see, is that while big children are off school, mums won’t be able to bring little ones to toddler groups anymore as they will be busy denying their big ones ice-cream and trips to Alton Towers.

What happens, I ask, if you are the careful lady owner of one toddler and your life is torn apart by the sudden lack of, and let’s face it, the simplest of daily routines?

I wake up on Wednesdays and the smell of emptiness is stifling. I wake up on Thursdays and I fear for my sanity.

The only day of rest is my Friday “learning to salsa” day but I have just been reliably informed, by text I may add, that this has now finished for the term.

It’s like being dumped by fax. How can they do this to us? Do they think we have a much more exciting life than we do?

Can they not see through our brave façade? Come on ladies let’s SOMGAD!

That’s Save Our Mothers from the Ghastly lack of Anything to Do.

I tell you what though, if the rain stopped it would help . . . wouldn’t it?