Today was the Monday-est, Tuesday ever. Long weekends tend to do that, I know, but today - today was one of the hard days. The laundry needed to be done (and much needed to be put away), the house needed to be tidied and hours and hours of work and drafts needed to be approved.
Violet cut herself with a spoon, somehow, eating gelato. I jumped into bed to snuggle with her, and the bed was covered in enough bagel crumbs to create an entirely new bagel. When did she sneak away with a bagel? There was a broken glass. The urgent-emails were piling up, and last week’s to-do list was only half-finished. We didn’t look in Olivia’s agenda, failing to see the reminder for the review spelling words test tomorrow, on the weekend, and night-before went through every single one of the 200+ words on the list. Jamie had plans to go out for a late dinner with friends. Not in the mood for his sarcasm, I yelled at him before he left. I walked upstairs for the first time since the morning, and the kids rooms were disastrous. The mental to-do list in my head was getting longer and longer - and getting to bed before midnight was looking impossible.
Violet fell asleep just before eight, bandaged up from her gelato injury, and I sent Olivia upstairs to read, with the advice that it would be easier to clean her room tonight, because she would waste a lot of time after school that she could use playing with friends.
I took five.
I took ten minutes for a guided meditation, a calming meditation, and just breathed. Five minutes changed the course of the day. I made a to-do list of the rest of the things that I needed to finish, sorted the giant pile of clean laundry to make it an easier task and sent Jamie a text message to apologize, explaining that I was overwhelmed.
I ate a few spoonfuls of the gelato in the freezer.
I breathed, walked upstairs and helped Olivia clean her room, tidying the upstairs mess the kids made earlier in the day, with a new mindset, and chatted with her - despite the fact that it was almost an hour past her bedtime and she was still awake. We talked about how proud I was of her hard work, and how she only had three or four words that were confusing her on the list of two-hundred. I was calm.
On the hard days, take five. Send the kids upstairs, and take a few moments to listen to a meditation to calm, breathe and have a couple of spoonfuls of gelato, or sneak those poptarts you wouldn’t dare feed the kids because they’re filled with so much sugar. Drink a glass of prosecco, hide in the pantry, just take five.
It changes everything.