I’m saying yes to everything. So long as it’s at 8.07am | Zoe Williams

After months of late nights and lie-ins, it's time for my kids to readjust to school hours. And here's me, leading by example

It is 8.07am and I am standing on a tennis court while my 15-year-old yells at me to stop looking at dogs. I take his point, that it is hard to follow the trajectories of two moving things at the same time but, on the other hand, there is a chow chow playing with a dalmatian, and I can't play tennis. Let physics do the work," he is saying, after chasing some ball I had managed to hit, but miles off the court. Don't make me do the work." Why is he pretending to be a coach? Where did he learn to talk like a coach? Was it on Instagram? Much more importantly, why am I here?

This is the long road back to school hours, the week when the summer holidays exact their price. For the first two weeks, the kids went nocturnal and I stayed the same, and this was a golden time, when I was gifted four beautiful morning hours, and I mostly spent those staring out of a window, bored, waiting for everyone else to wake up. By this, the final holiday week in England, we are all keeping junkie hours. Yesterday, the house wasn't fully awake, dressed and ready to leave until 1.43pm, and that's when we were going somewhere we actively wanted to go. The reasonable thing would be to claw this back by five minutes a day, but then we would have to go back and start in May.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Zoe Williams will host a Guardian Live event with the author and activist Naomi Klein in Manchester on Wednesday 27 September at 7pm BST. The event will also be livestreamed. Book tickets here