Balancing Act

There are literally thousands and blog posts about finding balance and blah, blah, BLAAAAAAAH.

I call BS.

There is no balance. Working full time and having kids means sometimes you miss things and sometimes you screw up and that's that. It just does.

I've been screwing up a lot lately.

I very barely made it to Mila's Christmas show on time. Actually, I was a few minutes late, but it was late within reason. Then I completely screwed up taking the poor kid to see Santa, to the point that we dashed to see him on Christmas Eve only to be told we were five minutes too late and TOO BAD. (Seriously. That particular elf can get bashed in the head with a stocking full of coal because she was beyond rude as she refused to let us walk in. ANYWAY.)

There are a whole bunch of fails ... I could list them for hours. I've spread them across both kids, but Mila has gotten the worst of the deal. I've broken promises big and small.

One of the promises I broke was to build a gingerbread house. While I find their construction to be a form of torture whenever kids are around (they're fun BY MYSELF ... it's not like I have control issue or anything), Mila really wanted to build one and I kept saying we would "tomorrow." The good news is that the kid has no sense of time, so "tomorrow" is an abstract concept that might mean 24 hours or 240 hours. She has no idea.

So, like, "tomorrow" never showed up.

Until Sunday. I have a tendency to visit every store in the tri-state reason following Christmas in search of Christmas trees on clearance, but this time I came across an aisle filled with gingerbread house kits on clearance for 75% off. Meaning, they were like $2. So I bought like five of them. I was going to save them all for next year, but then that little face popped into my space and we ended up building a gingerbread house a full week past New Years.

I think that's technically a fail. We went straight from building it to me sliding it into a trash bag when Mila wasn't looking because we're past the season of staring at dried out sugary foods. And I think I should be embarrassed that we made it that late? Probably?

TOO BAD.

The whole time we were building it, Mila was over-the-moon happy. There was no part of her that cared that we were doing a December activity in January. She got exactly what she wanted and the timing was fine.

So I think maybe this turned into a blog post about finding balance and how it is sort of possible. All you have to do is throw away some rules and it all works out.

Comments

[Caitlin Spearson]

Coming here to say you're not alone. I also bought clearance gingerbread houses, and we made them last weekend. :)

[Laura]

You are doing much better than me. I brought gingerbread houses before Christmas and we still haven't made them. I was thinking they might make cute Valentines Day houses because my daughter has a giant bag full of Christmas candy (too many relatives = too many stockings) and I cannot deal with any more sugar!