As most parents know, timing and schedule are a big part of being a parent. Or as we like to call it in our house...your MOJO. MOJO is, according to Wikipedia, a magical charm. Sacha and I use this term to describe what we have or what we lost in regards to the flow of a given day.
With a child it's all about schedules. When they eat, nap, snack, take a bath and go to bed is a wonderfully orchestrated flow and when everything works out perfectly and your Mojo is on, then you can bet on a perfect day. The problem is, those days can get whipped into a new dimension if any part of your perfect plan has a kink. Now the kinks are usually caused by others. I know this may seem egotistical but we mother's know time. We know schedules. The girl at the check out counter does not. Or all those people trying to get through the toll booth on the Bay Bridge do not. The man in the bathroom at the mall does not. And even your precious little child does not. The rest of the world just doesn't comply to the rules.
I always have the day's schedule ingrained in my head, especially on weekends. Leave the house before 10am to get errands and lunch in by 12 and back to the house by 12:30 for nap. After nap we have about two to three more hours of time to schedule activities, errands or park visits before dinner. After dinner we have about more one hour of play time before bath time then bedtime. If you don't have this schedule down you could face a melt down of gigantic proportions and who wants that? So, each day you strive to keep to schedule. Keep on point. This may seem rather stressful, but again, if the Mojo is flowing, everybody is happy.
I attribute my ability to schedule the day from my years of working in television. As a producer you are in charge of the shoot schedules, edit schedules and talent schedules. If you don't have the Mojo working for you it could result in loss of money, overtime pay, cranky TV hosts and even crankier bosses. I bring these skills into my parenting life.
Another aspect of parent timekeeping is the new found glory of waking up early and being out of the house at the crack of dawn. OK, maybe not the crack of dawn but before 10am and for most non-child people that is the crack of dawn. See, the benefit of the pre-10am hours is that the rest of the world is still in bed, meaning no lines at the grocery stores, no wait at brunch spots and nearly empty museums and zoos. We love it. We practically get the Zoo to ourselves if we get there right at 10. As we leave the Zoo around 12 noon and look at the line of people wrapped around the parking lot to get in, we chuckle to ourselves. If they only knew. Now that I think of it, forget I said anything. I need to keep this secret to myself.
1 comment:
There is no doubt keeping a schedule makes or breaks your day. Having that "inner producer" definitly gives us a leg up. I often wonder though if it can work against us...I mean, what happens when things do not go exactly as planned. Sometimes I think we get more jilted than the child.
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