Make it Work

Okay so I don't exactly enjoy grocery shopping. I love making food, dreaming up new recipes and combinations, poring over my favorite worn Williams Sonoma cookbook, kneading and rolling and shaping loaves of bread, stirring up muffins or shaping scones.

I love seeing the excitement on little faces as they clamber downstairs to the table on a Saturday morning, grabbing eagerly for a muffin or piling high the chocolate chip pancakes.

But I don't love shopping. In fact sometimes, most times I dread it. And it is even more dread-worthy (is that a word) when I must bring my little foursome along. The foursome are jolly and raucous and completely adorable and mostly manageable when the are within the familiar confines of home and yard. But put them in a brightly lit supermarket with hundreds of thousands of hands off items, anchored to a rickety and crowded cart, forced to watch me linger over which head of broccoli is the firmest, which type of creamer for my coffee, which bag of frozen peas has more...and they go just a little bit cuckoo. Grabbing things off the shelves, giving a poke or an unwanted tickle to a sibling, fighting over who gets to put the oatmeal in the cart (yes, just about anything looks exciting when someone else is getting to do it!)...Needless to say I don't exactly enjoy shopping with my children. At least not all of them at once...when I'm pressed for time and on a strict budget..

So this morning after all the normal rush of breakfast and lost shoes and scattered coats and repacking the diaper bag and changing several diapers and trying to run a brush through unruly bedheads and an argument over clothes that needed to be changed and finding sippy cups and packing snacks and buckling everyone into their carseats and nursing the baby once more and carting out all the LUGGAGE necessary to round out our arduous 12 minute trip to the grocery store...I couldn't find my keys.

They had been swallowed up in the black hole that is life with a toddler, a newborn and two under 8. Great. The only thing I like less than grocery shopping with four wiggle worms is not being able to grocery shop when I've put in the hour and a half of preparation and psyching myself up to grocery shop. But after I realized I'd lost my keys then I realized I didn't have my list either, then baby Jack started to whimper. And I realized it was time to call it a day. Or in our case an almost day.

So in we came. I pushed down the desire to search frantically for keys, barking at little people to help me. I swallowed down the urge to begin an immediate frenzied scrub, sweep, vacuum of the rumpled house before me. I realized and acknowledged my desire, my need to feel that I accomplished something from start to finish. And I looked at my little guys looking at me to see what would come next. It was all up to me. I didn't have control of this shopping trip, couldn't find my keys, couldn't keep the dishes from piling up around me, the crumbs from collecting on the floors, the mess of life from smearing the windows and walls. But I could choose my response to it all.

So I smiled, gave each little upturned face a big fat kiss and gathered up baby and out we went to sit in the sunshine while they made mudpies and played tag and swung as high as they could.And my sweet Will and I did some baking, read some stories, talked about life from the view of a little 3 year old guy.

That's something I could do. Choose how I would spend the rest of my day instead of letting it spend me.