A work in progress

Aside from the very fun video (if I do say so myself) I made for this blog not working we have had some other technical difficulties this week.

Technical difficulties with eyeblack.  

A necessity for my five year old who likes to put it on all by himself of course.

Technical difficulties with weather.  

On our way to the glorious sand dunes on Lake Michigan this weekend and we drove into skies like these.

Technical difficulties with focus, and expectations.

I need a new, fancier camera to fix the focus problem.  And I need to prepare my daughter for coping with plans changing to fix the expectations problem.

The problem is I don't know how!

It doesn't take a real genius to see what a number I am doing with my kids.  For example,  my morning routine.  Over the years as we were getting ready for school I have compared my minivan (mv) to a bank robber's getaway car.  As we race around grabbing whatever we can stuff in our backpacks I am yelling "go, go, go!"  Then we pile in the mv, some kids head first, and it is pedal to the metal out of the driveway.   

Then I wonder why the kids have anxiety about getting somewhere on time.  Or missing the bus.  

  

Another example of how I am corrupting my kiddos is my emotionality.  After growing up with a kooky mother, I swore I would never cry in front of my children.  Well, obviously I swore that way before I had my own kids.  But it still is different I am not crying to my child about how much I hate their father or how they are horrible little hateful children.  And I am not telling them I am crying because they don't love me.  Now of course I would NEVER do that (although I might say those things once when they are teenagers, I am only joking!).  

Anyway, forever I have told my kids I am crying because I am tired.  So they think they have the most exhausted mother in the world.

"Um Mommy, cool eyeblack," JT said to me one night after I had cried about something and my mascara ran onto my cheeks.

But they also know I cry at their dumb "America's Got Talent" show, when there is an inspirational story about the dance team that is trying to stay off the violent streets of Chicago.  

I cried a couple weeks ago during the happy ending in "Rio" because they all found love...the birds, the people and even the little homeless child.  Sorry, I should have typed spoiler alert if you were planning on getting Rio on demand later.

I also teared up yesterday because Jennifer Garner is pregnant with her third child and I am so happy for she and Ben Affleck.  What the hell?  

And yes, I cry a little when there are technical difficulties, like schedule changes; sick kids that don't seem sick enough to skip practice, but are sick enough to make you confused; and blogs that don't work.

But they are temporary and there are ways of fixing and coping.  The eyeblack is cute to me, so no biggie.  I need to accept that I cannot and never will be able to control mother nature.  And I am saving up for the camera.

The expectation/coping thing....a work in progress, just like the blog, that I will try not to cry about too much.

And as far as the morning school routine, we shall see in two weeks.  I just know it will be perfect because I am so much more organized this year and the kids are older and....  Crap, there I go again with the expectations being too damn high.  A work in progress.