Busy Day: Then and Now

I have a lot going on today: play date this afternoon, dinner with a friend who is in town for a conference, followed by book club at 8pm.

And I found myself stressing about all this activity before I went to bed last night.

This morning, however, as I was making muffins for the play date and debating whether to blow dry my hair or pray that the humidity gods will make the curl livable, I laughed at how times they have changed.

There was a time in my working world where one meeting at 2pm, a happy hour with a client, ending with a book club date in the evening would have been nothing. That would have just been a Tuesday. Nothing special. Nothing to stress about. In fact, I probably would have been stressing that there wasn't a 10am and a lunch meeting in there, too.

So how come it suddenly seems so daunting when I have three items on one day's calendar?

The pace of life as a stay at home mom is certainly different. The monotony of the day to day tasks move at a snail's pace sometimes compared to the fast paced meeting-to-meeting-to-proposal-writing-to-conference-call-to-commute that made up my working days. Routine is a mommy's friend, so three changes to that routine in one day is actually quite an anomaly. Not to mention the fact that I was only responsible for getting me and maybe a presentation or proposal to a meeting - not two kids, a diaper bag, snacks, activities to distract them during dinner and a plan to make sure car seats are in the right cars for the kid switch post-dinner.

Oh well. Times they have changed. And I'm okay with that. Let someone else run the rat race for a little while. I'm good.