Less is More

The first full week of school and day care is one day away from being in the books (aka its Thursday night, finally). We have embraced the idea of not overbooking our children, which has been fairly easy up to this point. L is only 4, there just aren't that many options for 3 and under. With the school year beginning, L is suddenly doing swim lessons, soccer practice, soccer games and violin lessons. To be fair, violin lessons are during school hours so they probably don't count, and soccer games don't even start for a few more weeks. Basically we have two nights dedicated to kids events and that will soon change to two nights and a weekend day. I think team sports and swimming and music are all valuable experiences, I just think I don't want to venture down this wormhole this early.

My first run at retrieving both girls from both different locations after work/school took almost an hour and a half. That's about 45 minutes too long. Unless I start leaving work at 3:30 everyday, we will not be making it to our scheduled events. I'm sure as road construction projects end and I learn the process for two different pick ups, we can shave some time off our new routine, hopefully. Today though, was not that magical time in the future where I'm suddenly the organized, non-frazzled mother that effortlessly gets all this stuff done; today was the harsh reality that you can't fit 60 minutes of stuff into 15 minutes of actual time.

Obviously, since I haven't mastered picking the girls up from school yet, I didn't have a nutritious, delicious and amazing dinner prepped for tonight either. After 60 minutes in 98 degree weather watching L watch her teammates, my husband nixed my vote for pizza and suggested Panera, if M would eat something there. M agreed to a PB&J with the one condition that nary a molecule of jelly even think of touching her sandwich. We agreed.

I'm not sure if it was the white bread, the not natural peanut butter, the non-organic yogurt, or the three potato chips they each negotiated away from their father, but tonight, those girls ate. L even ate the crust of her sandwich, M ate all the way to the crust. M has this unnatural ability to separate, with almost surgical precision, her food from its crust. They even had a few bites of my apple. It was one of those family dinners you see on tv that makes you roll your eyes because never has an actual dinner been eaten by real people that goes that well. We had two delightfully happy and chatty little people eating their dinners with little to no threatening or bribing. I don't know what happened but I do know I plan on eating dinner at Panera, in that booth, every single night until the magic stops or they kick us out.

If you recognize this booth, stay away, the magic is all mine.