We’ve just been through the holiday shuffle with all the craziness and all the traveling and all the consumption of yummy foods that we have now deemed untouchable. If you’re a parent, you know that holidays with kids can get really out of hand really fast.
This isn’t just about surviving the holidays, though. This is about surviving every day that’s A Special Day at all. This is for any day that means a change to the routine or something out of the ordinary or some kind of celebration or just one of those I-don’t-have-anything-left-to-cook-dinner kind of days.
What happens when you go through seasons like this—seasons where things look a little different, maybe—is that kids start thinking the exception is the norm. It happens so quickly—sometimes in the span of a few hours. The other day, we were driving home from church, and we passed a local pizza place, and my 4-year-olds started losing their minds about how we didn’t stop for the pizza and what were we going to have for lunch and everybody in this car was going to die of starvation.
We’ve ordered pizza after church one time in the last year. But because it’s something they love, and because it was so out of the ordinary that it has not lost is shiny novelty, they beg for this routine-that’s-not-a-routine every time we drive past the pizza place.
This is what The Day After anything looks like with children.
We run a pretty tight ship in our household. We have to, or we would be more insane than we already are. But anytime we go see grandparents or the boys are away for a weekend or one of them has a program at school that throws the nighttime routine off a little, they completely forget the habits we’ve built over the last six or seven or ten years, depending on their age.
This is astounding to me. I have a habit of stuffing my face with chocolate every Friday night, because Fridays are my cheat days. I missed a Friday night last month, but, unfortunately, my brain is not as pliable as a child’s, and stuffing my face with chocolate every Friday night is still a deeply ingrained habit.
Days after anything with children look wildly annoying, because we have to repeat in our robot voice the same instructions over and over and over again—please put your plate away, please put your plate away—because they somehow forget that this is a thing, due to the one night this week they didn’t have to do it.
But days after anything with children are also wildly fun and entertaining, because we get to relive memories. My boys have been talking nonstop about how their uncle came down from Arkansas for Christmas this year and how much they love him and miss him and wish he were here all the time to bother them while they’re supposed to be taking a nap. They go over and over and over that day we ate lunch at 1 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. and that night they stayed up too late baking cookies for the neighbors and all the exceptions we’ve had this holiday season. They relive the memories, and I get to relive the memories, too.
The best way to survive a day after anything with children is to embrace it for what it is: an opportunity to clarify your instructions ten billion times (because that’s how many times you’ll repeat them), a chance to streamline your routines in a way you might never have considered before, an invitation to sit with memories and see the exceptional world from the eye of a child.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and what the day after anything with children looks like. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
