Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Things go a little haywire

These are the things I failed to plan for in my day:
1) that Bam would be categorically unable to go to school without a red shirt and blue shorts, that this inability would extend to eating breakfast and any and all other portions of the morning routine. I dredged up a last minute somewhat mangy red shirt and strong armed the poor child (breakfast-less, since he didn't tell me he'd been unable to eat until we were halfway to school) to school, peeled him off my leg and into the arms of the kindergarten teacher and prayed that he would recover his mojo (he did, apparently quickly and the rest of the day was uneventful in his eyes) I went to Target and bought their last two red shirts. I still need to find some more blue shorts.
2) that certain children overstating their family job completion and understating their homework load would gain friend time passes and then fail to return in a timely fashion, that this failure combined with my failure to fully assemble dinner in a timely fashion before football practice would set our family organization clock on its head and that things would never fully recover.
3) that certain other children would have sufficiently faulty honesty and responsibility meters fueling the caterwompus of disorganization.
4) that the child with dish duty would require "proof" that it was his job before beginning (never could nail down what would constitute sufficient proof in his eyes--notarization? affidavit? sworn testimony under oath before a judge?).
5) that this same child would, in a manner still mysteriously inexplicable to us all, would head down the stairs, lean suddenly and end up end for end on the bottom level of the stairs with his glasses thrown from his face. He was not permanently damaged (no, we don't have our third cast of the summer, thank heaven) but was never able to explain what happened, nor has he been able to explain a few other things.

I have never attempted to deceive anyone into believing that we have any sort of well-oiled machine of organization and precision running in our family scheduling. We pretty much run on a mix of calendaring and seat-of-your-pants engineering. But I do try to plan and be timely, feed people, keep them alive and fulfilling their school and family obligations. I am trying to come to grips with the reality that my life seems destined to involve the creation of a certain amount of unintended rules each day (including, but not limited to,"do not fling yourself from the stairs to your near death to avoid doing dinner dishes"). My abilty to grasp this comes and goes. But when DH asked me upon his evening arrival home what went wrong with the day, I couldn't exactly say and I got grumpy as a result. Ultimately what it seems to boil down to is that I failed to plan for the unfathomable. I hate it when I do that.

2 comments:

meegz said...

You are great! You are an amazing Mom with amazing abilities! This post comes into play in my life and it seems I become a mute, I have a lack of words and most of the times actions too. Yeah, I'm pretty much stumped! I guess we are all in it together.

Monica said...

umm...you are an attorney!!! Only an attorney could write like that! Take deep breaths..you are awesome...just keep telling yourself that ...and put the kids to bed an hour early. Makes me feel better every time!