Coming Up With a Plan

As I mentioned before, we tend to compromise our plans to help out people. I don’t know why we do it, call it lack of foresight, or just being too nice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to help people, and it’s good not to focus all your attention on yourself, but it’s not always good to sacrifice your own stuff in the interest of helping out. It’s not a question of fault.

This cropped up this week, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. However, we did come up with an alternative plan, and it worked out in more ways than one. We have good friends who have a hectic life, and because of work and parenting, have to constantly find places for their kids when school and work don’t mesh. Enter the homeschool family, who are always home. They are our good friends, and their kids are buddies with A&N, so it’s not a problem... usually. It’s hard, however, when their needs clash with our plans. For the record, the situation is complicated.

With that in mind, we were asked to watch the kids, which is usually not a big deal, except that we had plans that came up at the last minute. Since we can’t seem to get enough hockey in our lives, we had decided to go to the homeschool skate and hockey game. I figure it’s like an open stick, so even better than skating, the kids (and I) get to slap a puck around. The problem was, one of the friends had to be back at school by a time that clashed with the hockey game. This meant leaving earlier than we had wanted, which is a bummer, but it was too late to back out of a favor. Maybe better not to have gotten into it in the first place, but live and learn, or “not,” in my case.

Either way, I found myself a bummed and a little bitter, especially since it usually entails a demand that we attend the friend’s event, which takes up more time and consumes more of our evening. This time around, we vowed we do things differently, and we came up with a plan. It went something like this: since we wanted to do the hockey, we decided that A&N would stay at the rink and I would take the girls back without our kids and drop them off at the school. Then R would pick up A&N and bring them home while I hung at the library with the other kid until their mom showed up. Beautiful, though I didn’t get to play hockey, but I’m fine with that, for now. This way, our friends are taken care of while our kids get to do what they wanted to do without sacrificing their time to help our friends. Does that make any sense?

The point is, it worked out, but the take home message in all this is that we really need to learn to say no. For softies like us, it’s a lot easier said than done, but I think we’re getting there. I’ve oversimplified the situation, because there is more to it, but I won’t go into that now, because a lot of it is due to my own personal neurosis.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Steven Goodwin for the pic.