Change Your Day, Change Your Life

We’ve all seen the movie where the guy wakes up and it’s the same day over and over and over again.  I think for many parents, life is sometimes just like that. Or at least it feels that way.  The same routine, day in and day out.  Nothing ever seems to change.  You get up at the same time each day.  You serve breakfast today just like you did yesterday and the day before that, and the day before that. You make the same number of school lunches each day, which by the way, during the course of a school year is a LOT of lunches!  You do the same errands this week as you did last week, because somehow the milk you bought a few days ago has disappeared, as it seems to do every week at the same time. You get the idea.

So what keeps us going around and around in this hamster wheel we call parenthood?  Or in the bigger picture... life?  I think it has partly to do with hope.  Hope that you will find in the course of the day, some small moment that will make this day stand out; that will make this day special.  We hope that today, the routine somehow changes, even just a little bit, to keep life exciting! 

Well, guess what?  Change doesn’t happen all by itself.  We have to make things change.  We have to put pineapple in the lunches this time instead of grapes every day.  We have to schedule play dates and coffee dates amongst the errands now and then just to change things up, and maybe, just maybe buy two jugs of milk instead of one so it doesn’t run out on the same day as it did last week!

No one wants to get stuck in a rut. But if we don’t take time to stop and enjoy the journey along the way, this life of parenting will pass us by at the speed of light and before you know it, it will be weeks gone by and you will look back and ask yourself, “Where was the fun in it?”  “How, and why, did it become so monotonous and routine?”  “Why didn’t I notice the joys and the blessings and the beauty in parenting?”  “How did I become a machine just going through the motions, instead of a  person who has real thoughts and feelings?”

If you want your life as a parent to be more than just the same day on ‘repeat’, if you want to ditch your Groundhog Day kind of life, then do something fun and extraordinary with your kids today!  (Do something indulgent for yourself today!)  Create those memorable moments with your kids that they will talk about for years, and that they will want to tell their kids about.  Life is too short to be dull!  Get out there and have fun!  Get out there and have a great life!