When the weekending has to stop

Dear followers, summer has brought its heat and its wave of laziness. The rhythm on this blog will be a bit slower in until the end of August. But worry not, as from September, feeds will come every week. So gently rest before giving it your best ;-)

Today, we are working on an article from a magazine called Good Housekeeping, and I chose an article by Michelle Hather about family life. For once I didn't change anything in the article, leaving it in its original language. That's why I labelled this input as "upper-intermediate". You can still try to work on it if your level is lower, but don't get frustrated if it's too difficult, it's completely normal. 

I suggest the following steps to discover it:

1) Read once without paying attention to the words you don't understand
2) Read again and try to make sense of the underlined words with context

4) Check the vocabulary input here while reading so you make better sense of the article

5) Read again

6) Answer the questions at the end of the article

7) Stay tuned for the crossword that will be published shortly together with the questions' answers.

Here we go!

There's nothing teenagers love more than a free house uncluttered by parental supervision. But Michelle Hather really, really wants to go away on that mini-break... 

Summer is here and I suddenly have the urge to see the sea. "Let's go away for the weekend," I say to my husband. He looks up from his newspaper crossword and groans. "You know what happened last time," he says. "It took an expensive plumber two weeks to put the house back together again." 

He's right. Last summer we grabbed a couple of days to ourselves and went to Guernsey. While we were away, there was a disaster in our newly-decorated bathroom. One of the boys somehow wrenched the heated towel rail off its fittings, and in their panic, the youngest two bought a packet of Polyfilla and tried to stick the radiator back in place. "I'm surprised you even noticed," said the sarcastic plumber who came to prise it off and mend the pipework. 

Dare we risk it again? Son Number One is back from university and used to fending for himself. I think about leaving him in charge, then remember the state of his student flat and shudder. 

It's not just my three I worry about. Even before our car's out of the street, Facebook will light up with the news of a free house. Teenagers live for a free house. They hunt in packs until they find someone whose parents have been foolish enough to go away for the weekend and... You see the problem. 

"We don't even want a party," Son Number Two says, when I broach the subject over dinner that night. "It'll just be a gathering."Son Number Three sniggers into his spaghetti bolognese. "Yeah, like mad shubs." (Teenspeak: a shubs is a house party, as in "I'm gonna have a shubs on Friday.") He yelps as his brother's Doc Marten boot connects with his shin.

"The thing is," my husband says later, "it doesn't matter whether it's a party or a gathering or even just the three of them left alone. They don't need an excuse to get into trouble."

He's right again. I gave up working full time after I discovered they had spent a day sitting on the roof of our house. God only knows what else they got up to that year, when they were too big for childcare but too daft not to have high jinx on the pointy end of a three-storey building. 

But we do need a break. We spend our time commuting, working, cooking and moaning at the boys. I can't remember the last time we saw a film together or discussed a book; squabbling over the cooker's instruction manual doesn't count, I've decided. We also need to trust the boys to be home alone - the boomerang generation being what it is, they are likely to be hanging around for some time. 

So we find a seaside B&B, only an hour or so drive away, and leave our three just for one night. We walk on the beach, watch a film in the afternoon and in the evening have oysters and a good bottle of wine. I marvel at the restorative power of the sea air and the lack of domesticity, and we promise we'll devote more time to each other. 

I do, of course, spend every spare moment texting home and checking the boys' Facebook pages for evidence of a party. But there's nothing. It's all quiet on the Western Front. We arrive home to find the house still standing and (suspiciously) tidy, the three of them watching television in a heap in the living room.  

"I'm so pleased we trusted them," I say to my husband as he fills the kettle in the kitchen. "We can go away again without worrying so much." He looks at me, his lips pulled in and clamped between his teeth, which means he is very, very angry. In his hand sits the sheared-off handle of the cold tap.

Questions:

1. Michelle wants to go to the beach for the weekend, but her husband doesn’t want to. Why?
2. What happened when they went away last time?
3. What is going to happen on Facebook when they go away?
4. Why did Michelle give up working full time?
5. Why does she say she needs to trust her boys home alone? What’s the boomerang generation?
6. How did they find their children when they came back from their weekend to the beach?
7. Why was her husband very angry?

Check your answers in next article, together with the crossword to check your vocabulary improvement!