Is your May turning into Mayhem?
If it makes you feel any better, even the good moms phone it in at the end of May. There’s no shame in doing the bare minimum if it helps you from quitting altogether! Even Mary Poppins would be snoozing her alarm and cashing in on extra screen time at this point in the month. The best routines have run their course, and the whole family seems to be constantly on the lookout for one more sharp pencil, someone’s keys and mom’s sanity. It’s time to initiate the emergency exit plan to get you through to the end of the year in one piece.
First, you must hold your boundaries. You’re not imagining it, there’s a massive uptick in emails and other communication to wrap up class projects, music programs, sports, graduations, fundraisers, and EVERYTHING ELSE your kids are involved in. You can still stick to your guns about answering all communication once a day at 8:00pm, or whatever other rules you have made to protect yourself from overload. Just because you get an email about field day juice box donations at midnight, doesn’t mean you have to answer it at midnight.
Next, you gotta lower your standards for dinners. If you’re still running a complex recipe rotation and getting your organic groceries in time to do your weekend lunch prepping, we applaud you! But for most of us, the sports practices, teacher appreciation brunches and fundraising meetings have depleted all our culinary energy and we often remember we need to make dinner on our way home to eat it! Now is the time to call in reinforcements – hot lunches, snack shacks, take out and delivery! There are so many inexpensive, quasi-healthy options out and about these days, and with the cost of groceries on the rise, you can tell yourself it’s not that much more money than cooking. Give yourself a night off from prep and dishes whenever you need it this month.
Finally, it’s okay to hold the phone on big summer plans. Don’t let the Karens pressure you into booking camps you can’t afford for every week of summer just because she knows when the registration opened. Go ahead and book the things you know might run a waitlist or priorities you know you want to plot, but don’t overbook or overcommit just yet! You’re going to need a lull after this month and it’s a whole lot easier to add things into a roomy schedule than it is to yank things off of a no-refunds, fully-booked summer calendar.
So hang in there, momma! The tattered backpacks and your can-do attitude only have to last another few weeks. The summer heat will hit soon enough and a good plan is all you need to help you keep your cool ‘till you’ve got the time to jump in that pool!
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