This year my toothless 7 year old decided to have a party at a local bounce/jump house. I piled up 7 girls in my minivan and we started off the jaunt to the party place. It was about 15 minutes away. As we neared our location and exit on the freeway, I noticed there were construction cones near the exit. All of the sudden I see a sign, "EXIT CLOSED FROM 10a-2p." Oh great, I thought, her party starts at 1:30.
Deep breath
Ok, I can do this. As my GPS starts a rant of 'Re-calculating, Re-calculating' I continue on to the next exit to circle back around.
We make it 1/2 back to the original street we wanted to exit on, only to find the traffic signals were out. There were police hand-directing traffic on this busy, congested street. Oh great, the exit is closed and now the power is out...
Deep breath
Girls in back of car, "When are we going to get there? Will we still have enough time to jump?" 7 year old (the birthday girl), "Mom, I'm going to miss my party" (insert all sorts of drama and crying here).
More Deep breaths
We finally make it to the street we wanted to get to, the same street the party place is located on, about 1/2 mile West of our direction, and guess what....
A parade goes by
I'm not kidding. A parade, with marching bands, baton twirlers, you name it. And, guess what, the street is CLOSED.
Deep breath.
This only happens to me. Who tries to go to their child's bday party to only be stuck in traffic by a neighborhood parade? Me. It's my life.
Well, 13 months ago I would have been a complete disaster, but now I just take a deep breath (notice the pattern!?) and I took time to ALLOW MYSELF TO LAUGH
Instead of getting all stressed out like I used to, I just laugh. At first, I had to CHOOSE to laugh. Sometimes it's easier to choose something else (anger, frustration, negativity, you name it...). You have to admit, there is something pretty funny about this. One day, when we laugh hysterically about this, we will remember this and that we finally made it to the party. The jump place was very gracious and wonderful and let the girls jump a bit longer that we were supposed to.
The girls didn't care when they opened their drumstick ice cream cones which had melted and refrozen to one side and looked like a "cliff of peanuts" instead of an ice cream scoop on top of the cone. It was all good.
To laugh or be stressed out. I choose to laugh. What a great day it was because I choose to laugh. Happy birthday to my sweet 7 year old who made me promise not to post pictures of her and her friends on this blog because, "That's so embarrassing, Mom!"
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