I’m a lucky woman.
I get to do a lot of cool things. This morning, I got to take my kids to their great public school, an Expeditionary Learning school, where children start every day Monday through Thursday with a morning meeting and start every Friday with a community meeting. I love that they see each other dance and dress up like bugs to share the weather report and recite their school pledge. Now that both my children are there, I enjoy catching up with other parents. Today, two of us discussed our plans to attend the event I was so excited to interview the organizers about, tomorrow’s Femworking Small Business and Blogger conference. I live in a place with a lot of cool opportunities.
I am privileged that I then got to come home and clean up from the morning: to whip out some orange and balsam fir essential oils to neutralize the smell of coconut oil, eggs and chicken broth from breakfast, to put away clean dishes and wash others, and to listen to NPR. My husband has a good job that provides for our needs, and he also isn’t a workaholic who is married to it or who has to travel. For these things I am and ought to be grateful.
But sometimes I get caught instead in fretting about what isn’t done:
- the healthy choices I’m not making that would benefit my body and my kids’ overall health, things like culturing my own foods and making sure we all take cod liver oil every morning
- progress on my new website, DC Healthy Green Families, which I really really want to turn into a sustainable business
- house-related issues that would benefit our health, or at least our aesthetic sensibility: venting the stove properly or pulling the trigger on a piece of art for the one big swath of wall on which we currently have a paper version of the concept we considered after seeing DisFunctional Design metal art at the Ann Arbor Art Fair
And then there is the fact that in order to go to the Femworking conference I am missing the first part of a group camping trip. To make it to the camping trip — late — I will miss the networking part of the conference. Seeing as I’m going to the conference as a blogger who writes about natural family living, the irony of skipping out on our first great shot at a group camping experience is just a little too much.
This morning I went out to take a photo of the pumpkin that has been growing suspended about 8 feet above the ground. The bigger it gets, the cooler it looks.
It started just as a tiny little thing, a golf ball on an arm, and then grew and grew until we knew it couldn’t last much longer.
It didn’t. When I went outside with my camera, it had fallen. It looked to be still intact, not smashed. Too sorry to touch it and too worried this meant my precarious balance was about to tip, I left the pumpkin undisturbed, hoping it might still grow and turn orange.
It was still beautiful, even caught in the hatch of telephone wires.
This was useful to remember when my husband, working from home and helping us get ready for the camping trip that he thinks is almost silly to go on considering my conference and his Ultimate games the following morning, complained that no one would clean the bathroom if he didn’t, and I absolutely lost it. And then my computer with the bum battery died because he’d used my power cord for his work computer. Angry is not who I want to be. Grateful is who I want to be.
When I started the computer back up, the tabs all restored, including the one I hadn’t read about 10 Things Not to Do During Mercury Retrograde, which is right now. Apparently spousal communication sucks during this time. Good to know.
So what started off as a post about how cool it is that I get to do and be so many things even if they conflict with each other is now being finished moments before I have to go get my kids at the bus stop while my spouse swears about something that’s pissing him off in the kitchen.
One thing at a time.
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