Oh man. I took one day off for my birthday and it was totally hard to get back on track here. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t good. And I know it says that I need to keep going. So, here I go.

I am not especially proud of this, and I hope this doesn’t make me a bad person, but I hate taking the boys to the park after school. There are two parts to my hatred. The first part is just that it is in the middle of the day and still during my work day. Of course, I can work a little bit later at night or rearrange my schedule to accommodate – that’s the beauty of owning my own business. I just always let it feel like an inconvenience.

The second part of my hatred is from the battles that I used to have with Luke to get him to try climbing walls and other play structures when he (unknown to us) had vision problems and things would weirdly terrify him.

This is how it would go at some point – Luke would climb to the top of the climbing wall. He would start climbing down. He’d get about a foot from the bottom and freak out asking for help. I’d tell him that he was almost there and that he could make it. He’d start crying and I’d get mad at him because he was literally 6-12 inches off of the ground at this point.

Of course, a couple of years later we found out that Luke had some issues with his eyes so that when he was looking down, it looked to him like he was way far off of the ground. Needless to say, those days at the park were not some of my prouder moments and it makes it even worse that there was an actual reason for Luke freaking out. I still feel super guilty about it and ever since then, I have not really liked the park. I take the boys sometimes, but not nearly as often as they’d like to go.

So today after school, was all about the boys. We were going to the park and I was going to have fun with them. I rearranged my schedule so that I knew that I wasn’t going to have any work to worry about while we were there. And I made sure that I came in with a good attitude.

I brought Zac’s basketball when I picked him up from school (he gets out of school 30 minutes before Luke) and we played for 30 minutes at his school. We shot some hoops, he climbed and jumped off of the mini bleachers, he jumped over and over again trying to grab a branch hanging down from a tree – just lots of dumb kid stuff – and he had a blast. And I had fun watching him have a blast.

Then we picked Luke up and headed for the park. Again, I just let them do what they wanted to do while I watched and took some pictures to send to Ann. They played tag, climbed on things, jumped off of things, and Zac finally was able to do the monkey bars which was pretty awesome to see. All in all, I’d say I had fun at the park – and considering my history with the park, that’s saying something.

Takeaway:

Attitude really is everything. I went in wanting to have fun and I had fun. I decided to put my boys first and it is so sad that that had to be a conscious decision. I’m glad to have redeemed the park and made it something that we can have fun doing as a family again.