A Little Bit of Time...

Imagine that you had a day when you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. Just one day to do as you pleased. What would you do?

As a result of our lovely friends being away on holiday for a week, I needed to do an extra nursery run and I decided that rather than ask for an extra work-from-home day, I would take a day's holiday to drop C off and then have a little bit of time to myself.

In the run up to my day, I spent a certain amount of time mulling over what I might get up to. I knew that I wanted to do only nice things and to make every minute count. To do things that are hard to do when you've got a little person needing your attention. The anticipation became a treat in itself; what would I do? what could I do? There was no should about it, no sense of duty, because I was only going to do things that I wanted to do.

And on the day itself, I dropped Catriona off at nursery and headed straight to the leisure centre to actually go for a swim. Going swimming with a toddler, means splashing around, jumping in and walking around the pool with a baby torpedo, but no actual swimming takes place. This time was different, I swam thirty leisurely lengths, savouring the silence, and I left the centre properly dressed, with dry hair and even with a bit of make-up on! 

Next up was a brisk walk up to Clarendon Palace in the glorious sunshine (lucky me) and a walk back through the nature reserve at Whitebridge Spinney. 

This ran nicely into lunchtime so I took myself off for an alfresco lunch of wild garlic tart at the very lovely Henderson's Artisan Bakery and stayed on after lunch to read my book in the sunshine with a cup of tea. 

I had planned lots of things for the afternoon – knit, make malteser tiffin, watch a movie, paint my nails – but the weather was so nice that I took a blanket to my nearest park and read my book until it was time to collect little C from nursery.

What a wonderful day. And the best part of that day? Seeing C's lovely little face when I picked her up from nursery and getting those two perfect, pudgy arms wrapped around my neck when I reached down to pick her for a cuddle.