My favourite of 2012. Note to readers: Laura Vanderkam is the author of the time-management book, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.

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I just need another half an hour.

If I’d had another half an hour last night, I’d have been more present in the moment while helping one child with homework, motivating the other child to practice his piano piece just one more time and cooking two separate dinners (one for eldest child who’d had orthodontic work done earlier in the day and who was having trouble figuring out how to swallow with a new dental appliance in his mouth, and one for the rest of us).

If I’d had another half an hour last night, I might have had time to fit in a run. I’ve committed to a 10km road race in May. I have plenty of time to train for it, if I start training now. I just need to figure out when to slot in some running time.

If I’d had another half an hour, I would have gone to bed half an hour earlier. But the clothes in the dryer were still damp at 11 pm, and I didn’t want to leave them in the dryer overnight, getting wrinkled and requiring more of my time in ironing.

If I’d had another half an hour, I’d have finished this blog post last night, in the time between when I discovered that our old computer had finally given up the ghost and when my husband, working to deadline (in paid employment, need I point out our priorities) needed to use our working laptop again.

Do Laura Vanderkam and her ilk account for those small, incremental events that steal away portions of the day? By my count, I require an extra two hours every night to accomplish everything that I want to do: not well, not perfectly, just adequately. Even if I scheduled every waking moment, I can’t anticipate every contingency, and what kind of life would we all be leading if we kept to such a schedule?

Here’s our evening planned out:

• 5:00 – 5:45: Commute Home (ETA 6:10 every second day because of transit delays; ETA 6:30 if youngest child needs to use the facilities for “pooping time!”).
• 5:45 – 6:30: Change out of work clothing into workout wear in vain attempt to fake it until you make it. Commence cooking dinner. Children to commence homework and music practice.
• 6:30 – 7:00  Dinner. (ETA 7:30 if any of the following events occur: (a) dinner burns because person cooking must also mediate a light sabre battle gone wrong; locate a glue stick needed for homework; engage in interesting conversation with a child who needs your attention; or (b) phone is answered immediately before dinner by child under age 18 who does not recognize that a 1-877 number (or worse, 1-234-567-8900) means someone we don’t want to talk to; or (c) “Pooping time!” delays arrival home to 6:30.  Dinner may be ready in 45 minutes or less on nights when both parents realize too late that they both forgot to defrost the pork chops; use emergency telephone code 967-1111 for rescue option.
• 7:30 -8:30: Completion of homework. Showers. Reading. Family time.
• 8:30 – 9:00: Tooth brushing. Pajama wearing.  Lights out at 9:00.
• 9:00 – 9:20: One more chapter. Parent may or may not fall asleep on child’s bed whilst finishing said chapter; this is optional.
• 9:20 – 9:30: Change out of workout wear, and into lounge wear (Really, this just means taking off my sports bra, but it’s important to acknowledge the day’s little victories).   Curse the winter for making it too dark outside for running.
• 9:30 – 10:00: Clean kitchen, prep meals for next day, plan clothes, review work. Optional: talk to spouse about their day. End time may be delayed to 12:00 am in the event of work deadlines, overloaded dryers (12:20 a.m. if you do the “smart” thing and split the load into two) or anything spilled on the kitchen floor that requires more than a paper towel to clean up. Consider going to sleep. Maybe.

Another half-hour? Multiply that by four, and we’d be golden. And lest you scoff, thinking that there’s no way anyone’s schedule can go so continually pear shaped as to necessitate two hours of contingency time, I have two words for you: Stomach Virus. Spilled milk.  Book Report. Hockey game. Stale bread. Dead line (okay, that’s one word, but work with me). Only the book report and hockey game can be planned for with any certainty, but they’re all equally likely to occur in any given week.

I wonder sometimes, whether it’s possible to have a “time deficit” the same way we speak of people having a “sleep deficit” — which, I suppose, is just a time deficit in a disciplined form. Don’t we all have this? A collection of things we should be doing, or want to be doing, in addition to the things that we have to do every day? Writing more. Exercising more. Spending more time with family. If the eventual outcome of a sleep deficit is that you crash, what’s the outcome of a time deficit? I suspect, it’s the same: a sudden, overwhelming urge to just lie down and NOT plan, not schedule. Not do. Just be. Or maybe to take a nap.

A half an hour should be enough.

When Youngest Child was born, my husband’s boss sent us a gift basket filled with baby treats. In among the baby rattles, blue onesies and teethers was a fluffy, brown eyed, soft-mouthed teddy bear not much bigger than the baby himself.

Oldest Child, who was 26 months old at the time, and being as gracious as a 26 month old can be when he realizes that he now has to share his parents attention and affection with a mewling infant brother, took one look at the teddy bear and pronounced that it was his.

“I’m sorry, honey” we said. “That’s your brother’s bear. It was meant for him”.

“No. MY bear! I want the bear.”

Back and forth we went. We tried to convince him that the bear wasn’t meant to be his. He did his best to convince us that the bear was the most precious thing he’d ever seen. I thought I might have heard him do his best Gollum impression as he intoned, “Bear. Bear! BEAAAARRR!” over and over.

We relented. We gave him the bear. Becoming a big brother was a big deal, and he was doing his level best to be a good big brother.  He wasn’t being overtly jealous, or agressive. He just wanted the bear. That bear, soon named Carlick, for reasons we’ve never understood, became Eldest Child’s closest companion: the stuffy that went everywhere, that was cuddled at night and fetched whenever he had a boo-boo.  And how could it hurt, we thought, if we gave him the bear? He wanted it so badly, and really:  Youngest Child will never know it was originally his, anyway.

Youngest Child would never know.

Ha.

I’m not sure who told Youngest Child that Carlick was originally his. All I know is that to this day, Youngest Child remains mightily put out by the idea that his mother and father would take HIS bear and give it to his brother.  Every now and then, Carlick is bear-napped from his spot on Eldest Child’s bed, and held ransom in retailiation for some real or imagined slight by Eldest Child against Youngest Child.  Occasionally, there are tears. Numerous replacement bears have been acquired for Youngest Child, and he has his own favourite, Paddington, with whom he cuddles at night (occasionally: interestingly, he’s not a big stuffed animal fan, anyway). All I can do is hope that one day he might see things from our perspective, as we were just trying to placate our first-born who really wanted that darn bear, nothing else.

It was love at first sight for Eldest Child, and I don’t know that I would do anything differently except this: next time, we’d keep our mouths shut!

Seven years ago, my husband and I flew across the country to Vancouver with our then three- and one-and-a-half year old sons to attend a friend’s wedding. Arriving late the day before the wedding (mistake #1) we failed to make arrangements for child care for the ceremony (mistake #2) so we decided to bring them with us (mistake #3).  After a quick snack at a friend’s home and a forty-five minute drive to the golf course where the ceremony was to be held, we woke the boys, who had both fallen asleep in the car, quickly hustled them to our seats (bag of toys in hand: look at us super parents, planing ahead!) to await the arrival of the beautiful bride at a lovely outdoor ceremony starting at three p.m.

Just as the music started, a small voice sounded from the child sitting on my lap: “I’m hungry”.

“You just ate.”

“No I didn’t. I’m hungry. I wanna go back to the car!”

“Honey, we can’t go back now. The bride will be here in…look! There she is!”

“I DON’T WANNA STAY HERE! I WANT TO EAT SOMETHING!”

“Shhh! We’ll get a snack in just…”

Eldest Child started to scream so loudly that I was worried he’d cause a tectonic shift (it being the west coast, this was a concern). I promptly threw him on my hip and ran as quickly as I could away from the ceremony, as the bride made her way up the flower strewn centre aisle to the sounds of a string quartet and a three-year old’s sobbing. I spent the entire ceremony in the parking lot trying to get him calmed down, while feeding him Vegetable Thins because those were the only snacks we’d thought to bring with us (Huge, screaming, neon-lit parenting mistake #4) Luckily, one of the golfers playing nearby took pity on us (after investigating to ensure that I wasn’t actually beating the child who was screaming his head off) and went and got some cool water from the clubhouse, and that helped.

It is hard to believe, but it’s true: it took three years, a 3300 km plane ride, a total change of scenery and schedule, and a three-hour time difference (for which we forgot to account, totally forgetting that 3 pm PST is, oh -noon — in Toronto*) for us to learn that Eldest Child is just about the most inconsolable, unreasonable, most colossally hangry person alive if he isn’t properly and promptly fed on schedule.

All those years, and we just thought he was difficult. Daily.

Every parent has one: that moment as a (sometimes, but clearly not always) new parent where you do something so incredibly stupid that you can’t believe that you haven’t seen yourself on a reality TV show.  Inspired by this series of posts that the Globe and Mail has been running for the past few weeks, we’ll be sharing our cringe-worthy rookie mistakes with all of you. We hope you’ll take a moment to share yours with us.

*Author’s note:  Mistakes clearly happen, and not just parenting ones. If you’re paying attention, you’ll note that 3 pm Vancouver time is indeed 6 pm Toronto time: we we’re late for dinner, not lunch. Eldest Child was still miserable.