Catching my breath

 SNOW DAAAAY!

I mean, there’s not a single flake of snow on the ground… YET, but that’s OK— snow days are magic. (I do actually still have a meeting I can’t miss this AM, but it’s on Zoom anyway, so it will be all nostalgic and end times-y at my house. If I put my laptop on our ginormous bathroom counter and drag in a stool from the kitchen island and close the door, all you can see is beige wall, a wood door, and a picture of the Liberty Bell- not bathroom things at all, and there’s a window on the same wall as the counter, so the light is good. AND I can also close the door to our room, and as long as the boys don’t punch each other and start screaming in their room directly below me (NOT ACTUALLY GUARANTEED), it’s a very quiet, insular place to be on a meeting. And! People need to pay better attention to their Zoom backgrounds still 2+ years later. NO BEDS in the frame, ppl.)

This week, you guys. OMG. Why are Ben and I always super busy at work at the same time? I mean yes, we are both academics, but he is an administrator— he’s not necessarily on the academic calendar and still! BOTH SLAMMED. It’s very good for our partnership and communication skills though, learning to give an inch or two when it feels like you have zero inches to spare and all that. Add in a few poorly timed kid appointments (that were made so long ago we had no idea the timing would be bad) and there you have it: a week where I can barely catch my breath.

But I am catching it anyway, darn it.

When we first moved to our house and Harry and Jack were in kindergarten and preschool and Coop was brand new, I met a fellow kindergarten mom on the playground who had five little boys. The oldest was a first grader, and the youngest was a nursling. She was always so sweet and happy and arrived like a messy ray of sunlight with a wagon loaded with kids. I asked her how she stayed so even-keeled and had it all together, and she told me that actually she was always late to everything. She said her mother always told her that a bad mood won’t make you get there any sooner, so she figured if she was late, she should be cheerful and calm about it because acting mad or stressed wouldn’t magically turn back the clock. I never even noticed she was late because she was always so darn unruffled. SUCH SIMPLE ADVICE, and I have been working on it ever since. BABY STEPS. (Also, she has since added 2 little girls to her brood and moved near family once her husband was done with his residency, and I am sure she is still enviably calm and cheerful). 

Anyway, I thought of that mom this week because I feel like I don’t have time for anything and am always rushing everywhere and have a million things to do after I tuck Minnie in when usually my slate is clean by then. Being huffy about it, though, is not going to make my to-do list any shorter.

So hello from a mom of 5 kids who is supposedly living the life of the mind, but my mind it just a chyron of things I need from Target, dinner prep timelines, and drop off/pick up calculus.