You know that phrase ‘burning the candle at both ends’ and how it pertains to doing too much or being too busy? Well, I think our little family has been buring the candle at both ends. And this weekend came as the biggest blessing because our plans changed and we just stayed home and the weather cooperated for us to be outside. I tend to get a bit panicky when we don’t have some family time that isn’t rushing from one place to another, and I found myself high-fiving my inner planner when we just decided to be home and get done what we could between games of chase, puzzles, reading aloud, etc.
On Friday, the girls and I had a fantastic beach date with our A-Town crew to help celebrate Thomas and Gavin both turning four. It was a fun, mud-covered affair and I’m always thankful for the other mothers and their children….we scoop up each other’s babies when they fall down, make sure rocks aren’t eaten, and embrace our fractured conversations. Sometimes those playdates are my saving grace, when the weeks feel long and the days longer. And having that time on Friday was a great way to start the weekend.
When Barry gets home from work and we do the playtime-dinner-prep-bathtime-bedtime-shuffle, there isn’t too much time before we’re needing to get to bed ourselves becuase we’ve got a chirping alarm clock each morning insisting we get out of bed (and she’s a cute alarm clock, don’t you worry) and start the day. And our life has been like that, just blowing by with hardly a moment to have a real conversation about things that needed to happen.
And then this weekend came and we realized that we were wiiiiide open with no plans glaring at us from the calendar, nobody coming over, nowhere to go….just our little family. Barry got to go paddleboard, I got to break a sweat, cars got washed, the garden got weeded, house vaccuumed, and, most importantly, we got time as a family just to be home with the girls getting our undivided attention. Stopping chores to play is so easy when there isn’t anything on the calendar. It was fantastic and so needed. Last night, after I gave Barry a haircut and everybody got bathed, we went on a walk through the neighborhoods around our house. Maggie rode her bike and Audrey watched from the stroller, never once letting go of the ball she brought with her. Barry and I shared monitoring privileges of either Sydney or Maggie, but got to talk between it all and watch our happy kid bike along.
By the time we got home, it was well past ‘bedtime’ and typically we’d be trading weary glances over the heads of our tired children. Instead, we were all refreshed and ready for the bedtime routine. There were no tears, the pressure to ‘put the house to bed’ slowly slipped away, and that candle that we’d been burning, at one end of another, quietly stopped burning as quickly.
