Peaceful Easy Feelings

This coming weekend will be the opposite of last weekend, activity-wise, and this is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love the great times and their unavoidable accompanying chaos, but it's nice to look at my calendar and see, aside from a long-overdue haircut appointment for me, all white space. It's filled in with the this and that of everyday life before you can blink of course, but I don't mind, because it just comes up as it comes up.

I understand that children thrive on schedules, and we have HR's daily routine down to an easy science at this point. But other than that, I have no plans to raise him as anything other than a free-form, free-range kid. I'm laid back to the extreme, and Mike's generally content to go with the flow as long as the important things get taken care of, and it just makes sense that we wouldn't be any different as parents. Maybe when the boy's in school things will take a more definitive shape, but I'm happy as anything to leave lots of room for improv. Sure we'll probably sign him up for soccer or t-ball or some kind of structure-requiring activity, but I just can't see it going too far. It's not that I fear stepping out of my comfort zone, just that it feels right to me to have at least one day of the weekend where there's nothing to get in the way of an impromptu road trip or just working through a pile of books. With any luck, this will appeal to my kid as well. And he doesn't get a say in it for quite some time anyway so score one for Mama.

As with everything, wait and see. It could be that he's going to show himself to require lots of structured time as he gets older and more fidgety. But I know for sure Mike and I are not going to suddenly morph into overscheduled types. And I'm confident that we can work within this frame without making HR miss out on anything. And that concludes my mini-manifesto of the day.

Now to close this week's half-assed musical theme loop (while also referencing The Last Waltz in here for the 500th time). This is a great story-song, and clearly the best version, no offense Joanie Baez.