Today has been both good and bad. Note the lack of superfluous capitals there. Not Good and Bad, just good and bad. Nothing amazing happened. Nothing awful happened. There were just the little ups and downs that fill so many days.
The downs:
Spending hours on end sorting invoices until my brain was exhausted.
Not having a book to escape into.
Having to leave the sorting unfinished because I ran out of time and had to leave for cub scouts.
the running, screaming, door-slamming chaos that is so typical of childhood games.
Link slamming a shopping cart into the back of my heel so hard that I was limping for the rest of the shopping trip.
My throat is a little sore, I hope I’m not getting sick.
Feeding the kids ramen for dinner because I had no energy/time to cook.
The ups:
Buying lunch for Patches and I, then sitting with him at the kitchen table while he chattered about all the thoughts that crossed his mind. He’s fascinated with the concept of reading and we read the ketchup bottle with great seriousness several times.
Kiki made a very logical suggestion that saved hours of shipping preparation work (“Mom, can’t you print those 1200 insert sheets on the computer instead of handwriting them?” Duh. Of course I can. It just completely failed to occur to me.)
Kiki came home from school and plopped Gail Carson Levine’s Fairest in front of me. She checked it out from the library and says I can read it first.
Driving off with Link to cub scouts only to discover that the mysterious thing pressing against the back of my leg was the neighbor’s cat who’d sneaked into the car while I was not looking. I stopped and opened the window to allow the kitty to jump out and run back home. (We’d only gotten about 50 feet down the road.)
Getting to walk around outside while my cub scouts picked up trash in the school yard.
My kids playing giggle-games together without arguing.
Gleek picking up three times as many toys as I asked her to do.
Link going shopping with me and cheerfully helping me load and unload groceries. He also talked cheerfully with me the whole time.
Finding clementine oranges on sale.
Freshly baked cookies from dough I didn’t have to make first.
Gleek requested to read her first chapter book. We’re starting with Junie B Jones.
Bedtime ran smoothly with no frustrations or upsets.
Howard had a productive day too.
Funny how a few inconsequential bad things completely over shadow the day until I sit down and line them all up like this. I started this entry grumpy and whiny. Now I want to go hug all of my kids and tell them how happy they make me. It’ll have to wait until morning though because most of them are asleep, which is in itself a happy thing.
Honestly, if this is a problem, tell howard to raid the Amazon shipment that is arriving in your name…
Call it early Christmas…
likesay, a few bad things make the whole day seem sour. It can even be just one bad thing, like someone making an inconsequential comment which you happen to take the wrong way, or something you thought you’d fixed being still wrong.
You forget all the good things that happened already, and you’re so busy being hacked off about the bad thing that happened that you fail to notice the other good ones that come after. Your putting them all in a list is an example to all of us, as I suspect we mostly do this kind of thing – your list shows that in fact, more good things happened (and doubtless more significant ones, e.g. Gleek and the reading) than the few bad ones. This is no doubt true of most days, if wwe only stop and look objectively at it.
The Brown Daily Herald has a weekly piece called “Diamonds and Coal”. It just goes through a bunch of good things that happened during the week, and a few bad things. And usually a cubic zirconium for whatever is kinda good, kinda bad.
Several of my friends have taken to doing this on a personal level, and it seems to really help, sometimes, just getting the knowledge of what exactly went wrong and what went right out there.