I love having my family visit. It's really nice to have them come and play with us. I love having my niece and nephew around. It's been so long that I hadn't even met my little niece yet and they hadn't met the twins.
Before I even begin to talk about the things that have happened, I have to say that I haven't always been this neurotic. I'm not a planner by nature, my life has made me that way. My son requires a whole lot of planning. He needs preparation so that we don't have meltdowns or chasing him because he ran away. Then there's the fact that I have 4 kids. While that may seem a bit crazy, it's really not with proper preparation.
That being said, I went crazy last week.
My brother Tony is the anti-planner. When he said that he was going to come down here and just wing it when it came to plans, I thought to myself that this would be okay, as long as I knew the day before what we were going to do the next day.
That didn't happen.
I think the worst case of anti-planning was when we were on our way to one activity when I got a phone call from him saying "why don't we just go to the beach instead?" I put up a few reasons why that wouldn't be my favorite choice and he just went around them. I went to the store and got my kids their swimsuits for this season (I needed to do that anyway) and then went back home to prepare for a trip to the beach.
I was freaking out the whole time too because the last time I'd been to the beach with my kids Micah had run away and we found him 2 miles away ( just realized I hadn't blogged about that particular incident, which is kind of weird considering the fact that it was so major...basically Micah wandered away when we weren't looking, the life guards found him an hour later 2 miles away and got him to get into their truck by telling him that the truck was going to Michigan...yeah, that made me so comfortable to know). It happened last summer, and I didn't take him back to the beach after that. I just couldn't.
Tony may be the anti-planner, but he cares about kids. He may freak me out for lack of planning, but he knew where all 6 kids were all the time. We made sure we took my mom also, which made it 4 adults and 6 kids. Not a bad ratio really.
Overall, everything turned out fine, but I just didn't enjoy myself as much without preparation.
Winging it with my kids just isn't my specialty. I seem like a pretty laid back person to some people, but really, 4 kids require planning in order to make my life even close to sane. I'm flexible in a lot of things, but I need at least a few hours notice for drastic changes in plans. Yeah, I totally blame my kids. On my own I don't usually plan anything. I don't need a plan when I'm just taking care of me. Those occasions are so seldom, though, that I don't usually have the opportunity to relax like that. I have 4 kids, and I like it that way. My kids have caused me to grow in the area of planning. I just don't think it's a bad thing even if it makes me seem neurotic when my family comes around. I'll take my "planner" label and go with it.
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