The Sweet Life

I am a mess of contradictions.

I love slow-paced days with lots of book reading, stopping to smell the flowers and giving the kids plenty of time for imaginative play. I also am task driven and work best--and seem to be happiest--when I check off all the items on my to-do list and keep my family to some semblance of a schedule. At the same time, I'm a terribly untidy person and hate housework (or at least I hate doing it with the kids around, it's not so bad if I'm left alone to focus) so I struggle with the daily tasks (even though they are on my task list) required to keep our home from being declared a trash dump instead of a habitation fit for human beings.

 
The result is that I focus too much on my task list without actually getting much done, I feel guilty about taking time to read or to gaze at the wonders in my own garden, and I am constantly annoyed by the the rooms of my home being littered with child-created debris.

 

All that introduction establishes the importance of the following statement: This week I took the time to watch the thunderstorms roll in--I so love a good summer thunderstorm--and allowed the kids romp and play in the puddles for as long as they wanted... and I did not feel guilty about the untended task list for a single second.

Life is a constant push/pull between what is important and what is urgent, between what I want to do and what I think I should be doing. And, frankly, I find it mentally exhausting.

But for this one day there was no interior debating or counting how many tasks were left undone.

We just had some good, old-fashioned (guilt-free) fun.