When things are just off kilter

“Thump, thump, plunk, plunk!” Hear that? It’s Ryder hitting a tree with a hammer. Not a kid hammer, a full-fledged Daddy hammer. Why is he doing it? Because he’s three I suppose. He’s now out of site and I hear him crying after a good “ka-plunk!”. I imagine whatever he decided to impale next returned with a fight…plastic things have a way of throwing force back at you, especially when they are domed. How do I know this? Don’t ask.

Sometimes in life there isn’t much explanation for why we do what we do. Or how it then effects us. I just know that much like Ryder and that hammer returning to him, I have felt life return to me a little too abruptly, out of the blue and frustrating for no good reason.

1 Peter 5:8-9 tells us,⁸ Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. ⁹ Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your fellow believers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

Now, I’m not saying that this was any sort of deep suffering. But I am saying that parenting, life, gets hectic and predictable in a way that causes discontent. And sometimes, when it tries to rule me I need to step back and readjust because I was starting to look and act like this dude (and seriously? Bubbles can make the best of us grumpy when we can’t get that darn cap off!):

For example, I had one of the best weeks with work the last week. This is wonderful news! After much dedication, its nice to see some slower weeks come by in congratulation of the work invested. Yet, Thursday I work up on the wrong side of the bed (which by the origin I was doing just fine – my right foot hit the floor first and I sleep on the right side of the bed, both of which are completely lucky and in agreement with the superstition…not that I believe in that anyways, but there’s the history if you cared to know). Yet my mood could not be shaken. My dear husband (“dear” in the sense that he puts up with the ugliest of sides of me and still reveals it to no one, he is just a saint like that) was probably quite grateful he “had” to go to work and was probably praying hard for the children as he left hearing the vacuum running at 7.30am (because that’s what I do when my world seems topsy-turvy – clean, no matter the time).

But a tip I have learned since having a child, and then another, and then on my way to another… is to sometimes toss the agenda of the day out the window and run, run, run. Far, far, away. And so we did.

I traded Rory for my niece Savannah (because Rory needed a nap and Savannah needed to get out as well) and we adventured to the mother of all libraries – Central Library – hear the angels chorus…yep, that’s the one.

Where the stairs are wide and welcoming to the kids’ floor, where the librarians don’t scold for being a bit too loud, and where they even have a decent selection of kids’ movies.

I think Ryder needed this too. He and I have been having a few moments in how certain habits are formed. I feel like a Russian ruler, divvying out squares of toilet paper, while he finds rolls for one sitting per visit equally as satisfactory. I win, because I earn the money, he loses “because I said so!” Blarg!

We even retreated to the oasis of the hammock for a few hours in the afternoon and Barnes and Noble for hot chocolate that evening; just me and my little man.

Because sometimes you just have to go out of the regular routine to squash it, kill it, tell it its done-for and move on to bigger and better things…like praying the next morning I truly do wake up on the right side of the bed.

What do you do when your day just starts out wrong? I’d like to know!