A Day in the Life of Sacha on the Road

This is an entry written for myself. This is my journal, afterall. Please call back for the next entry, which will be back to normal, I promise!

I made a comment on Facebook last night about being exhausted and that I was only now finding the time to read any books. Mum and Dad told me that my friends might take offence to that, having been at work all day, then having to deal with children and cooking and washing AFTER work. I read their message out to Dunc who looked up at me, with grotty clothes and messy hair and utterly exhausted eyes and said “But this IS hard work!!”

And it is. Admittedly all by choice, and we can sleep in as long as we want to, and we don’t HAVE to do anything, I guess. But we are still completely wrecked at the end of every single day.

My day starts at 6.45am pretty much. I can hear Angus wake up and then I don’t get back to sleep. This morning I was worrying about the awning, which we had left out and I could hear the wind was pretty strong. So then I’m awake. Angus comes in for cuddles, and I try desperately to stop the kid from talking and waking up Duncan. Eventually sometime after 7am I get up and Angus and I have our quiet morning time out in the ‘living room’ of Bertha. I make a cup of tea and he plays on his ipad, watches TV if we have the magic two ingredients (power AND reception) or writes in his journal. I write this blog at those times.

Eventually Lexie and Dunc join us and we have breakfast. We often need to be somewhere by 10am for a tour or on the road by 10 if we are moving, so it’s a quick load of dishes after breakfast and we are off. If we are staying put, I like the kids to do their schoolwork in the mornings. Dunc has a leisurely breakfast and the all-important coffee and its just easiest to wait until he’s done to start school, so we often start at 10am. I had visions of saying “turn to page 6 and do that” and having the kids work independently… Lexie does that, but Angus not so much. Not at all really. I have to be there nagging and/or helping him. Though he has improved recently, I am still required to be there for the whole time. I tend to do the morning dishes, or sort some washing, or scrub the cooktop, or tidy the tourist leaflets that accumulate in the corner of the couch. I seem to have become some sort of unwilling domestic goddess… Anyway. I do something that can be interrupted a million times while the kids work.

Our days are busy when we are not moving Bertha. We tend to be out and about a LOT. We have been to 6 different museums in the last few weeks alone. Sometimes we eat lunch out as a treat, often we will pop into an IGA, Woolies or Coles for a $4.20 bag of bacon and cheese rolls, and if we are in Bertha we will have a ‘nibblers’ lunch of tomatoes, cucumber, cheese, salami, crackers, dried fruit, etc. Sometimes the kids will make those lunches.

Then its some baking, because we are eating sooooo much better than previously. I rarely buy sweet biscuits anymore, as we don’t snack. Its just morning tea and afternoon tea and meals, so I do a fair bit of baking (which results in more loads of dishes).

Then its time for dinner, which I cook about half the time, even though I really hate that sort of cooking (I’m a baker, not a cook). Driving Bertha takes a lot of concentration, and parking her is often awkward so I like to give Dunc a night off cooking if he’s been driving. We tend to eat at about 7.30ish, which kind of sucks. If we eat earlier, I can get the kids to do the dishes. Most of the time, by the time we finish, its 8pm or later and the tired children have to go to bed to read. Which means at 8.30pm I start the last load of dishes. After which, I tend to sort through photos on the laptops and compress them for the blog. I upload posts at night and tend to go to bed at 9.30pm. I read through Facebook on my phone, as I am part of 2 different groups for families who are travelling Australia. It takes a while to catch up, so by then I am falling asleep and haven’t even picked up my book!!

Dunc has a very different day to me. He wakes at 8.30 or at 9am when I send Angus in to give him a cuddle. He either drives Bertha or has some part of Bertha that he is working on. In the last little while, he has installed a washing line, replaced the inverter, added a vent to the toilet, replaced the seal on the toilet, removed all of the batteries, made some groovy little locks for the top hatch and connected a new air hose fitting. He is constantly busy and whatever he does tends to require crawling around under the bus resulting in more washing!

We seem to have gravitated to very 1950s gender roles, though he DOES help with the kid’s schooling, the washing and dishes. And cooks a lot. But really, he’s responsible for outside, and I am responsible for inside.

Because he sleeps later in the mornings, he is not ready to sleep when I am, so he tends to stay up late watching telly (if we have it) or playing on Facebook or on the iPad. And because he was up so late in the night, he sleeps late in the mornings… and so on and so on!