Verbeter je leven
6 X HOW TO BREAK THE ROUTINE
“May, can I please have a day off tomorrow?” One of our nicest colleagues, whose name I won't mention further, had had it with her life.
She was either working or cooking, or she was doing laundry for the seventeenth time that week or emptying the dishwasher for the twenty-first time. Intensely bourgeois she found it to have become. She used to go out sometimes, but now she was too tired for that again.
If you have a job and have brought a few children into the world, you probably recognize it. You have to do everything and waving at lamps is something from a distant past. I have the great luck to occasionally go on a press trip and then lie for an hour on a bed by a pool with a book in my hand, but otherwise this phase of your life can be quite tough. And boring. So here come the alarm troops.
1. Take a day off
So my colleague did that wonderfully. Park the kids at the in-laws or pay your babysitter handsomely for a day (preferably with night) of undisturbed enjoyment. If I may advise you, I would do it on a Monday. That is the best day to skip work, after all.
2. Go to the best spa
If I want to pamper myself, I book a morning at the Akasha Spa of the Conservatorium Hotel. A quarter of an hour of swimming laps, a little bubbling in the jacuzzi, and then getting deeply warm in the hammam. Just lying down and horizontal on their beds, and who knows, you might just fall asleep.
3. Lunch with a glass
If you are in Amsterdam, I would just stay at the Conservatorium Hotel. Invite that friend you haven't seen in a long time for lunch and whisper to the waiter to welcome you both with two glasses of champagne. Don't consult her about it, because then she will have a thousand excuses. Just do it. And if she turns out to be in a dry February, just don't take her seriously, and otherwise you both drink the glasses empty. You wanted to not be bourgeois for a moment, right? Well then.
4. Go to the movies during the day
The best thing in the world, after buying a Chanel bag in Paris, is going to the movies during the day. Correction; going to the movies on a weekday. Alone. And then occasionally thinking about all those colleagues who are now having that conference call with your strict headquarters in Düsseldorf.
5. Go to a really good florist
Menno Kroon on Amsterdam's Cornelis Schuyt, Jasmijn in Haarlem, Pompon in the Amsterdam Jordaan, and oh, you probably have one nearby that is actually just a bit too expensive for every week, but where you become intensely happy.
Buy a designer bouquet (they actually last longer than that bunch of tulips at that stall on the corner) and also buy something permanent, which these kinds of florists often have the most beautiful. A blanket, a vase, a candle. Anything goes.
6. Make plans with your husband
Not seeing each other at home and then getting into a taxi together, no, meet at the restaurant, just like in the beginning. Really, that's so nice.
Attention! It is forbidden to do useful things today and to buy stuff for the kids. Understood?
