A friend of mine recently flew across the country with her six-year-old son Ryan to visit her mom. Grandma had been looking forward to their visit for weeks. Ryan was excited to spend time with Grandma and his East Coast cousins. And my friend was anticipating a long overdue visit with her family. Then the unexpected happened: Ryan got a fever on the plane and spent all four days of their visit in bed with a bad cold. There were no visits, no family meals, and no games or play dates because Ryan was contagious and needed to sleep. Then to make matters even worse, the plane home was rerouted and delayed.
Welcome to the world of Plan B Parenting—where perfect plans and little peeps plummet!
How do you handle it when your routine gets disrupted because of your children? What do you do when your kids force your plans to go south? Truthfully, there are only a few options. You could have a meltdown—simply fall apart and become useless. You could get angry and start the blame game. Or you could buck up and cope the best way you can.
It’s not that it’s easy. Sure, parenting is full of joy and fun. But it also has its disappointing moments. Even though we might like to be in control, of course, we’re not. You’ll remember that you weren’t in control when your children were born, so there’s no reason to think you could become the commander of a perfectly ordered life afterward.
Here are five strategies to shift your day when it starts to take a course of its own:
1. Shift your perspective. Let’s say you’ve planned a dinner party for friends and have bought ingredients for a complicated, gourmet meal. The day of the party—the day you had planned to prepare the dishes—little Johnny gets sick. You sit at the doctor’s office for an hour, you get stuck in traffic coming home, and then you spend time soothing your son because he is so uncomfortable. And suddenly you don’t have time to cook the dinner. You could panic, get snappy, or move so fast you start to break dishes. Of you could shift your perspective, pull out the Plan B Parenting motto, and say to yourself, “Let’s not take everything so seriously here.” It’s only a dinner party. My advice? Get carry-out or order in pizza. If your friends don’t understand, they probably aren’t very good friends anyway. And you can always reschedule the gourmet dinner.
