Monday, June 10, 2019

On the Irrelevancy Gold Stars

The other night, Shef woke us up at 11:05pm, roundabouts, to tell us that he'd qualified for a prestigious track meet. We thought he'd missed the time standard by a measly six-hundredths of a second over the course of a whole mile run, so we were all delighted to find out that New Balance Nationals accepted his time. Woot!

On hearing this news, I rose from my bed to help him register immediately as a midnight deadline approached. After we'd completed the paperwork, I tried to go back to blissful slumber and failed.

Lucky for me, I was in the middle of a delightful collection of essays by Mary Laura Philpott. It's called I Miss You When I Blink, and while I hate it when I can't sleep, I quite enjoyed the 90 minutes during which I read Philpott's musings on parenting, perfectionism, and the infernal PTA before drifting off again. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and recommend this book, especially if you're in the minivan stage of life, as I am. Today, my minivan and I are headed to no fewer than five destinations, dropping off and picking up like bosses.

I think Philpott would encourage me in this kid-wrangling. "I see you with your organized calendar," she'd say. And, she would likely give me a gold star if I saw her in person and she happened to be carrying a sheet of gold stars.

Since that scenario is unlikely, I think I'll just imagine my gold star. I'm imagining a big one right now.

2 comments:

KC said...

Actually, no biggie, but Mary Laura just gave me a gold star on Twitter. I'm taking it.

mm said...

I love that you received a gold star via Twitter!!