I love the new year. It brings a sense of newness to life and a chance to restart a worn out battery. It brings out self-challenges and forces you to explore your past experiences and make aspirations to be a better you in the future. It’s challenging, you know, setting a personal goal, a new year’s resolution, and actually following through. If you are like me, some days it’s just plain hard to accomplish the one thing you had on your mind to do, let alone take the time to survey yourself to see if you are sticking to a new year’s resolution. Today my personal goals were to:
- not lose my cool
- shower
- work-out
- cook a healthy dinner
Today’s reality went more like this:
- 7:00 am…kids wake-up. 7:45 am…lost my cool cause my 4-year-old decided that today he didn’t like pancakes, even though he eats them all the time
- My twin’s naps were interrupted, so no time for a shower (and my hair didn’t look too greasy, I thought it was ok enough to go out in public)
- Work-out? Well I considered my 19 trips up and down the stairs a sufficient workout for the day, I read once that picking up toys can burn calories, and carrying around my 35 pound 2-year-old is equivalent to lifting weights, right?!
- 5:00 pm just popped up on me all of a sudden…the kids are now following me around the kitchen screaming cause they are hungry…leftover pizza sounds good
So there you have it. Honestly, I’d like to tell you that I accomplished one of those daily goals above, but I didn’t. You know as a parent, sometimes you think “nothing I did really even mattered today.” But if you have kids, a loved one, a spouse, or students that depended on YOU, then, YES, what you did today DID MATTER.
“Because sometimes being dependable is more important than doing something remarkable”
I read that once and it really stuck with me. My kids depended on me to put food on the table, which I did. Was it a remarkable healthy dinner? No, but it got the job done and they lived through it. Tomorrow I will strive to meet those daily goals again. But today, I am ok with not being a remarkable mom, because at least I was dependable.
My point is not to discourage you from sticking to a New Year’s resolution because I LOVE goals and resolutions. My point is that when you feel you’ve failed yourself, don’t throw in the towel and hang your head. Tomorrow is a new day! I am sure that you may not have been the most ‘remarkable’ self you could be, but if you were dependable then job well done and tomorrow we can look forward to being remarkable together! Best of luck in 2018!