Juggling

I am beginning to realize why you rarely see anyone juggling four balls.  It takes practice and is hard work.  Not that our four little blessings are "balls" to juggle, but it requires the same skill and precision.  ha.  As a friend once told me when I was feeling over committed with everything I was trying to do (kids, work, volunteer stuff, home life, etc.), "you can only juggle so many things and be able to juggle them well and keep them all going.  If you add too many, they ALL end up getting dropped and falling to the ground."  It made sense then and really makes sense now.  It is up to me to prioritize and choose what to juggle.  The unnecessary things have to be put aside ... at least for now.  

And I guess the only time I have seen four of anything being juggled successfully, it is with two clowns or magicians or whoever is doing the juggling.  And sometimes it feels like my husband and I are clowns or that we need to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat or something.  But here we are, five weeks into this attempt to parent four children age 3 (barely) and under, and I have to say, I think we are doing ok.  No one has been injured.  Everyone has food to eat and gets bathed and has clean clothes to wear. It DEFINITELY takes two people to juggle this crew, and often more.  One night during our third week, we were going through our nightly routine, just the husband and myself.  And after I put James down to bed, he went in with the girls to put them down, and I grabbed baby Elliot for his bath and bottle, I remember thinking, wow, we are running like a freshly oiled machine.  And in that moment, we were.  We did not even have to communicate about it ... without any words spoken, we each knew what need to be done and what our duties were.  On one hand, that's pretty good for three weeks into it.  On the other hand, I am not sure what that says about us that no words were even needed and we just went through the motions.  Ha.  

And the juggling thing hit me again yesterday as we had all FOUR kids at the doctor's office in one day ... the girls in the morning for their 3 year check ups, baby Elliot tagged along with them and ended up having a double ear infection, and brother James went later that afternoon and also had an ear infection.  So yeah, we have four ear infected ears in the house right now.  But when I was thinking James might have something contagious, my thought was HOW were we going to add a contagious kid into the juggling act?  Surely, I would end up "dropping" someone if we added that in.  Luckily, we did not have to attempt that feat ... yet.  But we will.  

So I will keep practicing my juggling act.  And I will do it with a smile on my face because NEVER in a million years did I think I would be given all these precious little beings to juggle.