There are certain times of the year when the days move so fast and every day is so crammed full that a calendar – on paper or screen – can’t contain or corral it.
In my job, that’s every day from about Halloween to New Year’s.
As a mother, it’s the month before school ends.
Each and every day has a little extra task in it brought to me by my child. Over the weekend, it was potato salad for 75 people at a volunteer gig. Four dozen cookies for the teacher’s lounge. Nineteen gifts for a national youth exchange. Brownies for math class. None of this makes us a unique family, because every family I talk to is on the verge of having their neatly paced lives run amuck.
In early March, our family went to my youngest niece’s school to view the rainforest that had been crafted by her entire grade. I wrote about that magical day then. It was the camera shot I took afterward during “snack time” that hit home. I was already – two months out from the end of school! – talking to others about how “we’ll get to it this summer” and “that would be the perfect thing to do this summer.”
We were in the multi-purpose room of her school, and I saw physical proof of what I was already doing…packing the proverbial boxes on my calendar full for every day and every thing that needed to get done so that we could all arrive alive at summer. Unscathed. Whole. Ready for a slower pace.
Just a few more dozen cookies, many tests, a child’s three-plus-day trip to a science contest overlaid with his parents’ seven-plus-day business trip. Then the junior year of my son’s high school year will be behind him.
We’re almost there.
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