Hello Beautiful,
It’s Monday Morning hustle time… the weekend is done and it’s back to the grind.
I don’t know about you but I find that it never fails that my children want more of me when things are most busy. I’ll be hustling from one kid activity to the next, feeling like I am completely up to my eyes in the kids and one of them will ask for more. I am slowly learning that as I am more busy with ALL the kids, ONE of the kids is usually feeling shortchanged. These are the moments that used to make me want to scream. I’d think to myself “how can I possibly give more?” and I would resist the request to stay home from preschool or meet her for lunch or whatever it was. I felt like that time was needed for me to play catch up…
But here is what would happen, I’d resist my child needing me and that need would go unfulfilled… I’d get a little caught up but when I got my little from school, she still needed me. But at that time, all the kids were with me and I physically could not meet the need in the way she required… So then we’d get to bedtime and all would fall apart. Whichever child had that unfulfilled need for me would meltdown… and when one melts down, they all melt down. Now instead of 1 child needing me, there would be 4… By the time I had settled everyone down, there would be yelling and crying, someone would inevitably get hurt and we’d basically all just get to the point of empty and collapse. They would go to bed discouraged, I would wonder what I could have done differently and would have no energy left to do any of the things I had planned for after the kids were asleep. I would collapse along side them and the little progress made would seem negligible compared to the list left… And the cycle would repeat….
Well, I might not have figured it all out, and it doesn’t always work perfect, but I think I have found a magic solution that helps us all to stay on track, fulfilled and happy…
And it could not be easier… See, when I am at my busiest, I am the most unfocused on any one thing or person… and if my little says “Mommy, can you have lunch with me at school today?” I have learned that it is not about lunch. It is about that little one needing to see that in the midst of chaos, she is still the top priority. She needs me to open the calendar and put HER on their in pen, not pencil her in. She needs to be the thing that gets done first. And while it often feels like I am taking so many steps backwards by loosing that daylight, I have found that the time spent stopping and yielding to my child’s request is worth 3X the minutes that it takes to fill her need…
So with that in mind, in the middle of the Monday-Morning-Mama hustle, I stopped and brought this little beauty lunch… She had time that I devoted to her – not to all the kids, just to her. She may have spent more time talking to her friends than to me… I may have been overwhelmed by the lunch room chaos… But she knew, than in the midst of busy-ness, she was the priority… And if I’ve done it right, then tonight, she (and her siblings) will go to bed feeling filled with love and warmth…
And even if my to-do list doesn’t get completed, isn’t that our number one job as Mama?
XOXO
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