A Different World

Two weeks ago yesterday we started our new routine.  We are only in the middle of week three of the return to school and I'm already experiencing burn out.  I'm fairly certain my kids aren't far behind.  I don't know how we have scheduled so much in so little time, but we have.  I feel like such a conformist and I feel pressure from some imaginary (or is it?) force to sign up, do more, have it "all".  Last weekend as we rushed from church to our afternoon o' sports, I couldn't help but feel resentful.  That resentment was mostly directed at my poor husband who innocently signed up something like 10 weeks ago to play "a little softball". 

Somehow the vision I had of our son's flag football game and our daughter's cheerleading for the same football league going hand in hand, fitting together so nicely, has not happened.  At. All. 

Practices are not on the same night and games are not necessarily at the same time and if they are, not necessarily the same place.  Frustrating.  Even more frustrating that our daughter seems to feel about cheerleading the way I sort of expected her to feel about cheerleading.

Exhibit A

Although because I already had that expectation, I am holding myself together well.  It has taken me almost six years, but I have finally figured out how to best handle my mini-me daughter.  Not exactly rocket science, but I am proud that I am handling her disinterest like an adult, rather than like she might handle it if she were me (being the age she is now).
She hasn't given up on it and she hasn't asked to quit, but she definitely does not have the "love of the game" her brother has for all things sports.  She is desperately trying to find her niche because, my goodness, at almost six years old how can she not already know what sport she wants to commit to and play for the rest of her life?  This pressure doesn't come from her parents directly, but there is some pressure coming from somewhere.  We've done this to ourselves.  It is our generation organizing these bazillion sports choices and with bazillion practices with travel teams, etc.  It isn't me personally.  I'm not that ambitious I guess.  And maybe this isn't that far off from how lots of people my age grew up, but this is not anything like my childhood.  My small town childhood that I took for granted, but appreciate so much more now that I see the difference.  I wasn't rushing around from practice to practice eating meals on the go (can't even really remember ever eating in the car).  I don't remember my weekends being booked solid.  I do remember lots of time to play and having lots of friends to play with at my house and theirs.
A lot of that has to do with the size of my home town.  Small.  I think this best illustrates the size of where I grew up.  Once I was home from college and my dad left on a Tuesday evening at 5:55 PM to get to a meeting at church.  He was back home at  6:05 because he had confused the meeting night--it was Wednesday night.  Just a little blip on the radar, no big deal.  If that happened in most of the places I have lived, I would be so annoyed that I drove all the way to church on the wrong night.  It would have cost me more than 15 minutes.  (Although we are that close to our church now so it is possible I guess).
There was also the everyone knows everyone factor.  Not possible here.  I have met a few neighbors and they are nice, but most I never see and some I never will.  We haven't been here long enough to know people well enough to just let our kids run free with just anyone.  For the most part our kids have only played with the children of friends we knew the last time we lived here.  That is the biggest adjustment for me.  I want what I had for my kids because this seems so strange to me, but this is where I realize that it isn't that strange for everyone.  My husband did not know everyone in his home town and to him this feels pretty normal.  The life we had in Belgium in a very close-knit expat community, that was weird for him.
So I'm doing my best to adjust to this way of life.  Again I feel like I'm adjusting to more than just the over scheduling we've fallen into and the difference between my memory of childhood and my children's actual childhood.  I'm also adjusting to life as a stay-at-home-mom on this side of the world.  Some days it feels like I'm picking up and dropping off children all day long.  I feel like most days I'm making making meals and snacks all day long.  At this moment (2:30 PM), I have already started dinner and there are breakfast dishes in the sink, but lunch has been cleaned up and any minute now the girls will finish the puzzles they are working on and ask for a snack.  I spent one night last week turning this house upside down searching for our 3-year-old's "homework"-the "mystery bag".  She was so proud to have "homework" that she took it out of her backpack in between one of our pick ups/rushed meal/dash to practice and put it away.  She forgot where that was and I searched in every place I could think of before I sat down to write an e-mail to her teacher explaining that I couldn't find it.  I will admit that tears were involved and no one was awake or home to know that but me.  I like to keep it real though.  That same night I was up until almost 1 AM going through papers in backpacks and figuring out what needed to be sent to school, what extra stuff I needed to sign up for and checking to make sure I had not missed anything in all of the communication coming from the school.  I was up again the next morning at 6, started a fresh search for the mystery bag--which I found and then wrote a second e-mail to the teacher feeling ridiculous that I had pretty much just had an e-mail conversation with myself.
It hasn't all been crazy and frustrating this 2 1/2 weeks.  Although it is a rush in between picking up a kindergartner at 11:52 and dropping off a pre-schooler at 12:30, with a little planning ahead and organizing, we have been able to enjoy a nice picnic lunch at the preschool--just the three of us when the weather has been nice.  Hannah and I have enjoyed our "just us" time.  We've been shoe shopping, played piano together, taken a bike ride and checked out some library books.  We've also enjoyed the girl time afternoons together.  They still fight, of course, but they also had fun at the park last week and this afternoon have put together puzzles and built a clubhouse out of pillows and blankets.
We still haven't mastered the new schedule.  We had to switch around swimming lessons because in another moment-I'd-like-to-forget, we were stuck in endless construction traffic trying to make it to their lesson after rushing home from picking up Nathan, flying through his homework and making dinner/packing it up.  We arrived 15 minutes late to find the pool empty.  Someone had "gotten sick" in the pool and lessons were canceled that day.  Seriously?  Being 15 minutes late to a 30 minute lesson is kind of pointless anyway.  Somehow we were still late to "optional" baseball practice which has become less optional since we already have a conflict with the practice/games on Tuesday nights.  We're late a lot, which I hate, but I struggle with giving our third child enough time to get anywhere.  I have begun to refer to her as "Slow-mo" which has actually created more of a problem.  She thinks it is cute.  She's also way more intuitive than we give her credit for--she knows that when she moves too slow, she gets a free ride from me and she likes that.  At this rate I will be carrying her across the stage at her high school graduation.
I was never late to school as a child.  Quite the opposite, I was there first.  I'm pretty sure being dropped off with the school janitor like I was (so my mom could get to work on time) isn't allowed these days.  I've seen notes mixed in with the "Please have children at school no later than..." that read something like "Children may not be dropped off any earlier than..."  I know the first part is directed to people like me.  Everyone is up and ready in plenty of time as long as our youngest child doesn't suddenly have to go potty or insist on buckling her own seat belt and buckling her Heffalump into another seat. 
Just a little glimpse into my world and how I'm not feeling like I'm rockin' it these days.  Overwhelmed is understatement.  Spending a weekend with five other moms gave me comfort in that I'm not alone.  I can see it in the faces of other moms I don't know living here.  I can't remember who said it, but I heard a mom say recently that she feels like she is the only one who doesn't have this mom thing figured out and that everyone else has it so together.  I feel the same way.  How is it that so many of us feel like we don't have it together, but we look around us and feel that everyone else does?  Weird. 
Time to be done as the peace has come to an end--one side says, "She doesn't want a make-over and she hates me!"  The other side says, "No I did NOT Say that! See her guilty face!?"  It was nice while it lasted...