My Big Mouth Stresses Me Out
I need someone to follow me around holding a sign that says, "SHUT YOUR FACE."
Please.
I open my big mouth and say things I shouldn't all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. But, the whole thing with birthday party invites is continuously biting me in the, as Alexis would say, bum.
I don't know when the little card landed in Alexis' mailbox at school. A month ago? Six weeks? Something like that. It was long enough ago that I let her open it, told her what it said, and agreed that she could go to the birthday party. And THEN dance class started and that Saturday afternoon thing started to suck harder than a Dyson.
Dance class is at 1:00. The party was scheduled from 11:30-1:30. That really wouldn't have been much of a conflict, except for the part where the two things were scheduled to happen are 10 miles apart. OK, so the 10 miles wasn't really the problem, the sucktacular construction, evil traffic, and lack of a helicopter were the real problem. It's a 40-minute drive between Point A and Point B.
I figured that since the kid couldn't be in two places at once, I'd ask her what she wanted to do.
BOTH. Of course.
I thought about it and realized there was a chance that we could go to the birthday party and just leave early. We might miss a few minutes of dance class, but oh well. So be it.
I told Alexis the plan. Alexis agreed to the plan. I repeated the plan, strongly cautioning the kid that she would probably miss birthday cake and some other stuff because of the whole leaving the party early thing. I asked again if she wanted to skip dance class and stay at the party. The kid swore up and down that she was sure she wanted to do both.
When we finally got to the birthday party, I warned Alexis over and over and over that we would be leaving early. She said she was fine. She repeated it. She swore to it. Again and again because I couldn't go five minutes without reminding her. You know, because I don't trust her and I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING.
So we finally went to leave and this odd thing happened. Alexis was OK with it. She told the birthday girl goodbye, skipped out to the car, and declared that she couldn't wait to get to dance class.
I was completely weirded out. Where was the fit? Where were the tears? C'mon! It couldn't possibly be that easy!
But it was.
And now I'm thinking I need to burn any birthday party invitations that show up in the mailbox for the next few months. Alexis may have shown that she can be grown-up enough to be flexible with the scheduling, but I'm not grown-up enough to just let her be flexible. The stress of waiting for the other shoe to drop just might kill me.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
