A little bit of everything

Spending time with your kids is one of the best gifts of all. There’s no doubt about it.

During most of the year, all those who work away from home, strive to come up sooner so that they can spend more time with their kids. This would be a good time to talk about quality time and what to do or not with your kids. Or some chit-chat about the importance of quality time vs just lots of time. At least that’s what all those who can’t have lots of hours per day with their offspring advocate, isn’t it? It’s not how many hours you spend with them, but how good those hours are… both for you and for them. But this post is not about that, so I’ll talk about it some other time…

It’s about that time of year when finally you can spend more than a hour or two per day with those beautiful beings you call your own. Finally you don’t have to go to the office every morning and you wake up with their kisses in the morning and their jumps, up and down, in your bed. When you thought you could sleep in a little, they won’t let you… and that’s marvelous.

And now you can play with them. You have time to be the king in their little games, or play the dwarf as your daughter is the Snow White, or the big bad wolf to the Little Red Riding Hood.

But, as the day goes by, the bed of roses you thought you were in starts showing its thorns. If you’re a stay-at-home dad/mom you’re already used to how confusing and messy parts of the day can be. If your relation with your kids is just 1 or 2 hours each day, you’re not used to it. And like most of the things in life, it depends on how you look at it to define if it’s a bearable moment that will go by or if it will drive your crazy after a while.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m far for perfect and I don’t mean that I can make a messy place become an ethereal house. Nor do I have any magical theory on how to calm down a bunch of super-excited kids, who are on vacation and for whom this is a change in their routine too. But I do think, that something similar to an enchantment happens when one comes to accept things more easily and doesn’t over-stress about kids acting like… kids. And the funny thing is, when you decide to  take things more calmly, things actually tend to calm down.