Most days I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water.  The time between when we all get home in the evenings and is only a few hours (at most) but it sometimes feels like an eternity.  Our evening routine is a blur of dinner, baths, stories and bedtime mixed in with fighting, yelling and crying (it’s equal chances whether it’s a kid or me engaged in these behaviors).  There’s rarely a lull as we race against the clock, trying to get everyone to bed at a decent time so that we don’t have tired monsters on our hands in the morning.  This year both the 6- and 5-year-olds have some homework which means we have one more thing to add to our list of things to accomplish before bedtime.  I get hives just thinking about how we’re going to manage.

 

Everyone I talk to says that the only way to survive this crazy, beautiful mess called life is to embrace the chaos.  It turns out I’m not that good at embracing chaos.  I want to control everything.  I want to have a plan and execute that plan and have everything go exactly according to my plan all the time no matter what.  Unfortunately, we all know that this isn’t how life works.  And I’m working on getting better at just embracing the chaos so that I don’t drive myself to the looney bin trying to get everyone to adhere to my unachievable schedule.  Really, I am trying.

 

Last Monday my mom picked the 2-year-old up from school and kept her for the evening.  So we were down a kid.  It’s amazing what a difference one less kid can make.  We managed to eat dinner without any major protests and then I found myself in the baby’s room, laying on the floor while she played happily next to me.  The 5-year-old was entertaining himself by playing with some night vision goggles that he got for his birthday and my husband was working on cleaning up the dinner dishes.  The 6-year-old brought me her homework folder and sat down on the floor next to me as we looked it over.  We talked about what she needed to do and she set off, completing the assignments as she sat on the floor next to me.

 

And as I sat there, I realized that I was in the middle of something amazing.  Right then, in that moment, everyone was content.  The 2-year-old was getting to spend some special one-on-one time with her Grammy.  My husband was cleaning up the kitchen without being asked and without being bombarded by 20 other simultaneous requests.  The 5-year-old was fighting crime or spying on the neighbors (or whatever one does with night vision goggles).  The baby was chewing on a random piece of cardboard she found lying on the floor (probably not the most appropriate thing but she didn’t swallow any and she was happy so I went with it).  The 6-year-old was sitting next to me on the floor, doing her homework all by herself.

 

No one was crying.  No one was fighting.  No one was having a fit.  No one needed anything from me.  Everyone was happy doing what they were doing.  And when it dawned on me what was happening, I decided to just sit there and enjoyed it.  I knew it wouldn’t last forever and it may not happen again for a long time but it was happening right then.  And I was soaking it up.

 

The next night we were back to shrieking and foot stomping and crying because someone told someone else that they have “baby cheese” (we are at the stage where adding the word “baby” to anything makes it worst insult imaginable).  But there, in those few quiet moments, everyone was completely content.  Even me.