Wake up 7am and get myself and children ready.
School run.
Work until 3pm.
School run.
Work until 5pm.
Nursery run and pick up the wife from the train station.
Home 6pm
Feed kids and get them ready for bed
8pm to 9pm – cleaning house and getting ready for the next day.
Have about an hour or two to myself before going bed.
Same thing Monday to Friday. Saturday is spend next to all day doing things with the kids and Sunday they have numerous activities that takes me up to 3pm. It’s just all feeling a bit too routine at the moment.
What do you do to stop the mundane feeling seep in?
31 comments
Is this how life is with kids? I’m having second thoughts now 😮
Wear an eyepatch to work but change the eye around occasionally and see if anyone calls you out on it.
Buy ant farms with different breeds of ant and then connect them together. Place bets on who wins.
Start wearing increasingly large shoulder pads with all of your clothes.
Start your own time zone.
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I joined a competitive farting group on Whatsapp, where myself and 84 others send voicenotes of our farts and rate them. Breaks up the monotony of life a bit.
Do something, doesn’t need to be much but maybe just a group activity you go to once a week. If you have a partner then it’s their turn to look after the kids, if not make a deal with friends/family to look after the little ones (or even get a babysitter). Just because you have kids it doesn’t mean that has to be your whole life and everyone deserves some “me time”
Go running, build little forts and hideouts in the woods, go on holidays, Turkey, Lithuania, Spain, France and so on.
Sometimes go to the local, have a pint.
Do city breaks with my best mate. Frankfurt, Bologna, Bucharest and so on.
At work in the last four years alone I’ve been stabbed in the arm, bottled, attacked with a pitchfork and run over amongst other nasty things.
I don’t mind when things are mundane from time to time.
• Start a new hobby (personally I do knitting and find it quite relaxing after a stressful day just to mindlessly make a garment; now it’s colder, I am starting to wear my homemade jumpers and people can’t tell I made them – quite rewarding!)
• Learn a new language (Duolingo, anyone?)
• Plan a holiday (or something enjoyable and new to look forward to)
• Learn how to cook a new recipe (baking cookies, Chinese cooking, bread-making, etc.)
• Grow some plants (I have tomatoes this year and I feel very proud they taste better than supermarket ones – and I got the seeds originally from supermarket tomatoes!)
• Ask yourself, your wife, friends or close relatives thought-provoking questions to create stimulating discussions every now and then (would you rather know what you know now and go back to being a child or know what you know now and stay in the present?)
Find a space in your week – maybe one evening each for you and your partner – where you go out and do/learn something completely new to you. Could be volunteering, could be a craft class or a hobby group, the key is just to make space for something unfamiliar and a little bit outside your comfort zone, and also to be DOING instead of just observing.
I think men & women have spread themselves too thin. We are exhausted. It’s time to work together. The capitalists have won. Wages have stagnated for decades. Working 8 h/day is too much if both in a couple must (with children).
Download a hiking/ walking app and go do it. More extreme – go travelling.
Get some earpods,make a banging playlist and then go for a long walk in the woods….the repetiveness will just melt away and your mind will feel clear and refreshed….
Start doing something for yourself. It seems everything is done for your kids but nothing for you. Your kids will appreciate a parent who had their own life and later on, when they graduate and grow up, it’ll be easier to let them go.
Sign up for a class once a week, anything, language, dance, instrument, sport, heck, go to a book club. Do anything that’s for you. It’ll break down the routine and will allow you something to look forward to.
Fall in love the mundane. Pay attention to simple tasks as if the first time you have done it.
Try and make space to meet new people..preferably offline!
Leave the wife and kids and join the French Foreign Legion. Within a few months you’ll be absolutely dying to have a tedious saturday morning talking to a bigoted moron dad in a softplay area.
This is the life I want, having a schedule that doesn’t change and keeping the same place to live for as long as you want. I’m in college (US) and it’s a never-ending series of changes. It’s better to have stability, so you can adequately plan for things to do that you enjoy instead of sharing a bedroom and working while taking classes. It’s like working four part-time jobs and living in a barracks
I sit on my hand so it goes numb before masturbating with it.
Same dude…. every week is the same for me. Is this all life is!? It’s fucking boring as hell.
Start you own hobby and not just about kids. If you like hiking and being out that would help.
Take your lady on a date every once in a while
At least once a week each of you gets off the evening duties and does their own thing. Go to a gig, find a club, new hobby, class. There must be something that interests you that is not about your family.
Life will come along and shit things up for you in unexpected ways without your input. Enjoy the mundane, you never know when it will end.
What’s your wife’s role in this routine?
-Split routine with wife so you can have some evenings off.
-get kids asleep by 19:30
-put kids in after school club so you have more time and combine nursery and school run into one.
Same situation, it sucks and I have another 10yrs at least!
I’ve found alcohol helps and more recently cannabis.
Growing house plants and seeing them change every day has sometimes been something that has helped me look forward to something and see something every day
Heroin and magic mushrooms.
I feel you. It seems that life is nothing but working vs. errands and dumb chores, especially pointless household cleaning that usually isn’t even for your benefit. It’s to shut up your guests or the letting agent inspection.
I’ve got a backlog of TV to watch and a game I was excited about but haven’t had time to play in over a week now.
I have no idea how people chill out in their immaculate show homes when they haven’t even hired a housekeeper.
Whatever you do, don’t buy a unicycle. Save yourself some money and just buy a t shirt with “look at me” on it.
It will probably naturally change once your kids get older and are more independent.
However, at the moment try and do even one of your routine things differently – something as simple as taking a different route what you would usually take. Look at things differently and your perspective will change. What seems mundane actually really isn’t.
Seems like your wife isn’t doing anything? Is she contributing?
Time poverty is what you’re suffering from.
Used to be (1960s/70s) you could buy a 3 bed with 1 person working a regular job. Mortgage would be around 4x annual salary, so while you’re paying a fairly high interest rate the costs are pretty negligible and it’s all yours by the time you’re 60 at which point you rip out the equity and get a buy-to-let property to rent out to pay for your retirement.
Today, no couple, even with both working, can afford the smallest of shitty houses without significant help from mum and dad or some sort of other windfall or really 6 jobs.
It’s no wonder people are getting married and having kids later and later. There’s not just the money, it’s the time. Can’t work full time and still be a parent.. hence time poverty.
I’m in a similar boat. Very little time for “me” or for my wife. Or even together.
The only way out is really to just plan stuff. Get it in the calendar and commit to it. Do it with friends if you think it’s therefore more likely to happen.