Giving myself a break

I despise Mondays and I dislike Fridays.

You were nodding along with me for a millisecond, but then froze mid-nod when you read the word “Friday,” and thought, Wait…what??

I know, it’s strange.  Mondays we can loathe right out in the open, but we have to be secretive if we are Friday-haters.  So I don’t need to explain my Monday-aversion, but as to Fridays, well.  You can start here, or if you (like me) are busy, I’ll just sum up.

Fridays are the days when I am just done.  Fried.  Sick of spending almost every waking minute with two small people.  Ready for the weekend to arrive and with it a parent who is fresh off loads of adult time and thrilled to be answering the little blue-eyed why goblin two hundred times a day.  Me?  I’m happy even to get out the door to go grocery shopping if it means 10 minutes of blissful silence in the car.

So sure, Friday nights are great, but Friday days?  They’re crap.  Or, more accurately, I am crap.  My best parenting self checks out on Fridays and my mediocre mom takes over.  We get through, but we’re all really happy when the day is done.

So now I give myself a break every Monday and every Friday.  I like to make up lists and rules and schedules for myself, not because I am as awesomely organized as I would like to be.  Rather, it’s because my brain is filled with To Do tumbleweeds and if I don’t have some kind of outline, they will blow away out my ears and little else will get done beyond the survival tasks.  So I make lists like what loads of laundry I should do each day so I don’t have to spend any time deliberating about it each morning.  By the end of the week, it’s all done (except of course that it isn’t because laundry is eternal, but you know what I mean).  And I make meal plans because otherwise we eat a lot of spaghetti or macaroni & cheese (that’s Kraft dinner for all the Canadians out there, including my Team Captain here).

Anyway, because I have all of these lists and schedules, I have learned to build in breaks.  So for laundry, I have “dry cleaning” written on Sundays because now that I don’t go to work (often), I almost never have dry cleaning to do.  Voila: a day of rest.  I know, it’s a novel concept.

On the dreaded Mondays, we skip baths.  Usually as part of our nighttime routine we bathe one boy or the other and lately both since they love splashing together in the tub.  But sometimes I just need to let them run around a little more or read an extra story or just not wrangle two slippery, silly bodies into towels and dry clothes.  So we skip it.  And we love it.

My nod to my Friday disgust used to be Friday Field Trips and will be again now that Theo has given up his morning nap.  I miss the quiet time with Sebastian, but I love having a big block of time for fun outings!  Anyway, there will be that, but also there is the best tradition ever:  Take Out Friday.  There is little that makes me jump for joy during the Witching Hour more than not having to cook.

So now, instead of feeling like Monday is pure evil and Friday is her snarky sidekick, I occasionally maybe even look forward to them.  Just a little.

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How about you?  Any breaks you give yourself on a regular basis?