I work with a 20-year-old guy who reminds me often, with his tales of weekend escapades with mates, what it was like to be young and free and full of spontaneity.
It doesn’t feel like that long ago I was 20, but I’m more than double that now.
Somehow you get busy living, breaking up, making up, starting a family and raising kids, and before you know it you’re in your 40s.
Sometimes I recall being just two decades old and think, ‘Those were the good old days’, a simpler time when there was no shortage of friends carrying few responsibilities like myself, who were always down to jump in a car at the drop of a hat and head away for an impulsive adventure.
But my kids are closer in age to my workmate than I am, so right now I have ready-made little adventure buddies, kind of making it a full-circle moment.
Of course, as their mother, that means I’m always the designated driver, always the one who shouts everybody, always the one responsible for making sure everyone’s got everything they need etcetera, etcetera.
So it’s probably more like going with tight-ass friends who never chip in or offer to drive, but still, at least you’ve got good company.
It’s just more than a week until my firstborn turns 16.
Just a couple of months until my youngest becomes a teenager.
And my middle one is, well, smack bang in the middle of both of their ages.
They’ve always travelled well, but they are way more portable and come with far fewer accessories now than when they were babies and toddlers.
They no longer require a demanding routine based on strict meal and nap times either, of course.
As young men, they are now excited by spontaneity rather than thrown by it.
At every stage of a child’s life, parenting is challenging.
Parenting teens is so much harder in many ways than when they were tiny little humans, but in other ways, it’s far easier.
So last Friday when work and school were done for the week, after a few days of sickness and facing a weekend that had very little etched into its calendar, we were looking for something spontaneous to do.
While we’ve been a few times before, the Melbourne Airport viewing areas seemed a more fitting destination this time, given my 12-year-old’s current obsession with planes.
So we took a five-hour round trip there, spending two hours each way in transit, and one sitting propped under blankets on outdoor beanbags in the tray of the ute, eating carnival food for dinner from the food truck nearby, while the sky grew dark and plane after plane appeared out of the mist in the distance before flying low over our heads as they came in to land at the airport just across the road.
It would be a cheap activity if we lived closer to an international airport or if fuel wasn’t so expensive at the moment.
But nonetheless, I think it’s such a charming little thing to do and I hope my kids remember it when they’re grown and driving and looking for somewhere romantic or thrilling to take other special people in their lives.
The roar of the jet engines overhead reverberates right through your body and in turn puts a sparkle in eyes and plasters wide grins across faces.
It was a misty night, so the incoming planes weren’t visible from as far out as they would be on a clear one.
You could see the glow of the lights forming an outline of each plane in the fog before you could see the planes themselves, which was kind of eerie, but added an extra element of excitement as each of us tried to spot the next plane before anyone else did.
We watched from around 6pm to 7pm before the mist turned into much more unpleasant rain and forced us back inside the cab and on to the road home, but during that time we lost count of how many planes had landed.
They were approaching thick and fast, with just a couple of minutes between each, which gave me a much better understanding of flight delays, seeing just how tight the schedule is, so when something doesn’t go to plan, interrupting the well-oiled timetable machine could be a recipe for disaster.
My little one’s fixations on certain things can last years, or they can last just a couple of weeks or months, so I’m glad we found a free moment and some motivation to go plane spotting right in the thick of his fascination.
He got to see all the planes in real life that he’s been watching on his Flight Radar app, giving us a running commentary of aircraft models, speeds, flight paths and even origins and destinations for each airline.
I mean, I’ve forgotten it all already, but I’m sure he’s going to remember it all for some time.
And that’s precisely why we parents do what we do, right?
Whether you’re right into planes or not at all, I still reckon it’s an activity worth engaging in for everyone at least once in their lives.
If you don’t want to make a special trip, it’s easy enough to tack on to the end of a weekend trip to Melbourne given it’s on the Shepp side of the Big Smoke.
And you need only stop for a few minutes to get a couple of cheap thrills (and maybe a food truck snack for the drive home).