Losing it............

...... my mind that is!
So, soon I will, as promised, blog about my newly finished and first ever re-finishing furniture project, but for now I am simply going to blog about my revelation of a moment, if it were in fact profound enough to be called that.
Today was a pretty good day- Gabe didn't sleep great, but not too horrible. The sun was out, we went on a run, went to the park, Josh came home for lunch. Grace was on pretty good behavior and Gabe was good too. However by the end of the day the mundaness of the week was driving the three of us (yes even gabe) CRAZY!!! I mean crazy. Every two minutes Grace would say "i'm bored can I watch a movie?" To which I would say, "no, its gorgeous outside why don't you go out and play?". And I'm not exagerating one little bit- every sentence out of my mouth for THIRTY minutes, at the least, was - "grace stop kicking gabe, grace stop jumping on the couch, grace stop pinching gabe, grace stop pulling my shirt..........on and on and on. Now Grace really was doing all those naughty little things but who could blame her, I was bored out of my mind too! And I was losing it. Even though I knew she was acting up because she was bored just like me, I started to yell and snap and be a nasty mommy- and it wasn't her fault.
So this is where I could have a) took the kids on another trip to the park b) set grace up with an art project while I finished making dinner c) let grace ride her bike down the street d) wrote a letter to grandma.......and the list goes on and on of all the things I should have or at least could have done to resolve the situation. But I went into survival mode. A mode most often resorted to when the kids have croup and all plans and agendas must be cancelled, somebody has a fever, or like Christmas eve and my homemade presents are only half finished- those kinds of situations. But I went into it anyway- mostly to preserve any shred of sanity I had left today. and this is what I did. "Grace get out of timeout, we're going to get an ice cream cone!" Yes, it may have been 5:20! Yes, dinner may have been litterally half cooked on the stove, and yes, this was a totally bad mommy move, but IT WAS worth it. And I tell you what, I was a much better mommy because of it. It lifted our spirits. We decided to bring a cone to Josh who was finishing up at work. He was ready to leave by the time we got there so he let the kids play for a few minutes at his work while I went back home to finish making dinner in peace. It was perfect. Before, we were all in crummy moods, we were bored, we were down, and even though now I can think of about a hundred other things i could have done to make the evening better, in my mommy fight or flight mode I almost always resort to ice cream. And today- it worked.