Giving Yourself some Grace

We just returned from two days of camping (half a day in the rain!) - preceded by one day of packing and followed by two days of cleaning up and digging out. Notice the gerund tense of cleaning and digging - I still have plenty to do on those fronts, starting with the mound of laundry that needs to be folded, sorted, and put away.

On Wednesday our dear little girl will begin her first day of first grade at her new school, a step that we have been preparing for almost 5 months. Today was partly consumed by formal orientation-type events to seal the deal.

Last week I had high hopes that by this evening everything would be in perfect order and I'd be happily entering a post about camping adventures with your special needs child or capping off the getting ready for a new school series. Instead I'm sitting here with a half-finished grocery list for groceries that should have been bought this evening after my littles were safely asleep, and instead will be bought tomorrow morning before everyone starts begging for breakfast (I hope!) As hard as I've been working for the last week or so, I quite simply over-estimated my ability to keep up with the treadmill that I'm on.

So here is my practical tip for today:

Every once in a while you need to give yourself some grace, some space...whatever you want to call it.

• Stop pushing for it all to be done perfectly, because, well, you'll end up as a heap on the floor behind a treadmill that will keep right on running.
• Scale back. Find the items on the to do list that can be done as a shortcut without doing any harm.
• Procrastinate. If you can't do it all today, find the one thing that can be done tomorrow (or the next day) without missing a deadline or making life harder for yourself then.

I'm going to practice what I'm preaching...finish this grocery list and hit the hay. Won't you join me in spreading a little grace around? Permission to punt and/or procrastinate granted!

This post is participating in the Moms' 30-minute Blog Challenge at Steady Mom. You can head over there to meet some pretty fabulous Mommy bloggers...Total time for this post 15 minutes!