Behind the Smiles

Do you ever look at pictures of someone's family and think "wow, they have it all together.  They all really love each other and have so much fun.  They are so lucky."    One of the things that I like about pictures is that they really can't lie.  The lens captures the secrets.  It also captures moments.  Those supper happy pictures are super happy people.....in that moment!  

My kids wanted to have one last day of fun before school started.  Coming up with the super fun something to do was not easy.  It took us over an hour of fighting, arguing, crying and pleading to come up with a plan that everyone wanted to do.  

The truth was, I didn't want to really do any of the options.  I was in "my house needs a good scrubbing" mode.  The outside of the house is a mess as well because we have been overrun by weeds.  After a summer with everyone home, the house needs a good cleaning and reorganizing and I am starting to feel claustrophobic.  

One thing we have learned in our house is that no one is ever all happy at the same time.  Someone is going to end up not getting what they want.  We just try to rotate the sadness.  The next time we have to decided on something, the person who was sad last time gets more say this time.  

We finally made a decision and inevitably someone was sad about it.  So sad, that he wanted to stay home and not even go.  In truth, there isn't much that can entice him away from the house but there were other options that we had that he wanted to do, we just ended up not choosing them.

He really thought he was going to stay home.  Now, I'm a Mom and I know my kids.  I knew that he would be just fine and have fun even though he said that this place was "the lame version of disney land that someone puked on."  Well, this was supposed to be "family fun day." So I wasn't about to let him stay home.

Forcing a 14 year old to do anything just doesn't work so I gave him options.  He could choose to stay home and pull the weeds to help the family or he could get in the car and come with us for some fun and we would all pull weeds together another time.  He did not see this as a choice, but a punishment.  This was of little consequence to me.  He had a choice to make and he needed to make it.  As you can see from the picture, the weed situation is pretty bad.  We get a couple of drops of rain and a forest of grass starts to grow......everywhere but where it is supposed to.  

Just because my son didn't like the choices he had, doesn't mean that he didn't have them.  People like to believe that having a choice means getting to do whatever you want, whenever you want.  That's not how life works.  Most of the time our choices are between things that we don't want to do.  Wouldn't choose to do.  But need to be done anyway because you are part of a family unit, a work unit, a community, etc...

As I suspected, he chose to come with us.  And low and behold, he had fun at this "super lame" place.  Why, because we were together.  It was a struggle to get there and hard choices had to be made, but for the most part, we had fun.  We had the most fun playing laser tag...I would say MJ had the most fun....because she totally kicked all our behinds.  The bumper cars were also a nice way to have fun and take out our frustrations with each other at the same time.  Genius!  heehee

Ps, as I mentioned, pictures almost never lie.....  You can see by the look on my little ones face, when we were sitting in the go-cart, that he was not entirely happy.  This was because he wasn't tall enough to drive one himself and he was trying to still be happy about riding with me.