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Only So Many Hours in a Day

Pumpkin asked me the other day, as I reminded her of the time for the fifth time that morning, why “grownups always lie about the time.” I stopped dead in my nagging tracks. “What do you mean?” “Well,” she started slowly explaining, “you said it was already 7:15 and it’s only 7:11. And you always do that. It’s like when you told me I had to start doing things for myself because I was 7 before I even turned 7.”

Talk about an early morning gut-check.

Why do grownups do that? Why do I do that? She, of course, in her complete innocence, didn’t realize the profound questions she was making me ask myself. Billy Joel’s “Vienna” starts playing in my head – a song that I often here in my states of over-stressed melancholy - reminding me to "slow down, you crazy child."

Here I am still reeling from the fact that she did actually turn 7 just two weeks ago and I spend so much time and energy hurrying her – hurrying them both – worried about the next appointment, the next event. Always worrying about what is coming, what I need to do, where we need to be – losing, in that worry, the moment. So caught up in keeping up with life that I miss out on living.

As much as I hate to admit it, it’s also reflected back at me by our little Bug, who in the middle of the most fun-imaginable day chock full of carnivals and candy and friends and games, will ask me, “what other fun thing are we going to do after this?” It makes me crazy. I try to tell her to just enjoy what we are doing, which is obviously sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher to her – especially when she looks at my actions in always rushing, worrying, checking off boxes, and scheduling more “to dos.”

So I couldn’t explain to Pumpkin why grownups do that. But what I could do – and what I did – was promise her that we would have a slow-down summer. We have things planned, but they are not going to cause us stress. I’m not going to be so adamant about a schedule that I miss an opportunity. We are going to be bored and see what kind of fun we can create with that boredom. We are going to smell flowers – literally. And we are never, ever going to say that it’s a time that it isn’t. Those 4 extra minutes could hold magic for us.

Most importantly, mama is going to “cool it off before [she] burn[s] it out.”


And I hope this summer to find more time to write here and elsewhere; but I’m not going to stress if I don’t find that time because they are only this age once.

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