The day of the week kids always manage to ruin.

By BERN MORLEY

I used to have this dream. It really didn’t seem unobtainable at the time but now, with a few more years of parenting experience, I know it was far too big a dream to ever be realised.

It was to have a nice relaxing family day out. I told you I dream big.

I didn’t really think that I was asking too much or aiming too high when I thought that we could just kick a ball around a park for a bit and follow it up with a nice, mid-priced lunch somewhere, just the five of us. Preferably in a restaurant where we could fob the kids off to a supervised play area and then sit quietly in the beautiful sunshine, having a few Sunday beverages and watch the world go by.

Yeah, so that was never going to happen.

It started when my son turned four and received 2nd hand football boots from some friends. For two solid weeks, those shoes only left his feet when it was time to sleep and even then, he was reluctant to part with them. He stood on my exposed fingers and toes with the studs no less than five times.

So many expletives. So, so many expletives.

So, with his sudden fascination with all things football, we figured we should take him and his boots down the local oval and use them for what they were intended, kicking a football.

At around 11am, we got ready to leave the house and head out. Oh wait, the receptacle of darkness, AKA the teenager daughter, was still in bed, asleep. Sleeping off a big night of doing f**k-all, apparently. I shot-gunned not to be the one to wake her and retreated to the car. She appeared at my window fifteen minutes later dressed for what I imagine you would wear to a Metallica concert. Our conversation went like this:

HER: Can’t I stay here?

ME: No.

ME: We’re also going to have a nice lunch.

HER: We always do what they want to do, never what *I* want to do

ME: Well what do you want to do?

HER: I don’t know. Nothing.

ME: Get in the car.

We turned up to the football ground and exploded out of the car as only a family of five (jam packed into a ridiculously small car) can and made our way over to the oval.

This is when the teenager thought it would be a great idea to position herself right under the goalposts and read a book and look all melancholy. We told her to move, she chose to ignore us. Two balls to the head later, she still refused to move but was sobbing silently.

My other, less sporty son was wandering around the field, only to return intermittently to lament on the litter situation, often referring to it as a “wasteland” and surely a sign of the “end of days”.

As for the four-year-old, the reason we were even down at this godforsaken oval? Well he’d lost it almost immediately. Apparently his father was either kicking the ball too high, too low, too fast, too slow. There was no pleasing him. He did manage to kick it over the goalposts twice. Two times out of about 54 attempts meant 52 meltdowns. Fun times.

By the time he’d gotten himself wedged in the tree he had climbed in a fit of rage, we called time on the Morley football adventure. Time to activate part B – relaxing lunch.

I’ll admit at this point I was ready to throw in the towel, go home and commence drinking.

Screw a nice steak; we had cheezels in the cupboard and all manner of alcoholic selections on top of the fridge. But we soldiered on, determined we would have a nice day out.

For some unknown reason we decided to try somewhere we’d heard about yet never actually been to. It was in a dodgy area yet people were raving about it and we were a family wearing football shoes, heavy black eye makeup and thongs, we were hardly in a position to judge.

Apart from the teenager still moaning about god knows what and peeping up from her angsty Vampire book every so often to shoot me daggers, it felt like we might actually get some mileage out of this Sunday after all.

Then we were asked to leave. Well, leave the sunshine. Apparently only people smoking could sit in the sweet area where you could actually keep an eye on your children in the playground. Well planned, d**kheads.

As we attempted to move ourselves, Phil accidently knocked his beer and, in turn, gave the seven-year-old a bath in Tooheys New. Cue the screaming. Not because he was soaked in beer, but because now he’d have to get “naked in front of people!”.

We settled into more appropriate seats and I started reading the Sunday paper. As talk turned to the Ekka (Brisbane’s Royal show), Phil declared we were going to go this year. News to me as a) he usually hates the Ekka and b) I don’t even have a b; I was completely thrown. Immediately the kids went nuts scouring the show bag guide. The teenager decided her brothers would be getting the Mega Moron bag which of course they both took umbrage at and the name calling commenced. Jack fell from his chair after being repeatedly asked to sit still and the other two had upped the ante and started a thumb war that rapidly declined.

I on the other hand, was mopping up beer, whisper-screaming death threats under my breath and mechanically chewing the steak I could no longer enjoy. I looked at my husband and he at me and I shook my head. I turned serenely to my three animals children and quietly told them that there would be no more Sunday lunches and there would definitely not be a trip to the Ekka. I also may have said they were a bunch of ingrates. At this point all three started to cry.

Cheers to a relaxing Sunday guys!

How about you? Do you ever just get to have a nice, relaxing time out with the kids? Or like my attempts, do they always just end in disaster?