The planning begins…
Ooo, we have to do THIS next Saturday, I think to myself as I peruse Facebook or Madison Moms Blog’s helpful guide to October. Pause as I scribble the event down in my notebook or enter it into our shared phone calendar, then search for another fun family activity, making sure I have something planned for both morning and afternoon on both weekend days.
Reality hits…
Enter the weekend, where weather, extra short or extra long naps (is that a thing?), work schedules, or a sick kiddo rudely interrupts my carefully laid out and jam-packed weekend plans. #toddlerlife, am I right? Cue grumpy mama, disappointed that I’m ‘wasting time’ or wasting our precious weekends.
Why do I do this to myself? Maybe it’s because the weekend is the only time we really have to be together, as both my husband and I work full-time and our daughter goes to daycare five days a week. I want to feel like we’re making lasting memories and doing all those Instagram-worthy events, checking orchards and family hiking trips off some arbitrary list.
However, when things invariably don’t go my way, I tend to obsess over the activities we didn’t do, and focus on all the experiences we missed out on, instead of reminiscing on the fun memories we did have.
And when we do have weekends where we have all the big adventures, and we move from activity to activity, with only a break for nap in between, I often feel exhausted and unproductive by the end of the weekend, with Monday looming large on the horizon.
Lessons learned…
So where’s the middle ground? I’m not sure, but I’m trying to figure that out myself, for both my sanity and for my little family’s happiness.
Perhaps it’s one planned event a weekend, such as a local 5k, neighborhood festival, or a play date with friends. Try to throw in something that I would enjoy, or my husband would enjoy, even if it’s as simple as going to a barre class with a friend while my husband hangs out with my daughter, or grabbing a drink together before heading to the grocery store at the end of the weekend.
And, most importantly I think, making sure I’m counting all those little moments in between…
…The times we eat homemade waffles on a lazy Saturday morning, a quick trip up the road to our local zoo to visit the lions, or a wagon ride to the nearby park to swing (current obsession) before the Packers game. These experiences that I don’t have to schedule to the nth degree, that we can just enjoy our time together. And still snap all those photos, of course.
