Spontaneity.

Spontaneity.

It's not a word I use much.

Seriously, I had to look it up - like in an actual PAPER dictionary - to figure out how to spell it.

I was so far off, spell check wouldn't even help me out.

For those of you who know me in my real life, you know I'm something of a planner.

It comes from a bit of anal-retentiveness years of working crazy hours and multiple jobs and my control freak nature sometimes going weeks between days off and trying to raise two kids and a terrible case of ocd maintain a household and occasionally, just occasionally, sleep.  Some might have said I was a bit, ahem, tightly wound.

There simply was not enough time left over in my life to be spontaneous.

If I wanted to have lunch with someone on a Thursday then I had to make sure I knew the date at least a month in advance in order to get it on the schedule.

Really.

However, when I quit my job to be a stay at home Mama, I decided that I would make a LOT of changes to my life.

I took up running.

I got a new look.

I started going a lot more places, both with and without my kids.

Oh, and I made a plan to become more spontaneous.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

It's hard to let go of a lifetime of structure and planning.

But I'm definitely making strides.

I feel more relaxed than I ever have.  I don't stress about the housework, or if the kids are dressed just right (or at all), or what I'm going to be doing next Tuesday at 3:06pm.

My life is starting to feel... easier, I guess, now that I'm just letting things happen instead of trying to plan for every single thing.

Just the other day, I put a half-cooked dinner in the fridge, called the sitter, dropped the kids off and went out to dinner.  All in the span of 30 minutes.

Another time recently, I put the kids to bed, left RJ in charge at home, and went grocery shopping - alone - at 9 at night, even though everybody with any sense at all knows that grocery shopping should only be done between the hours of 5am and 11am.

It's a start.

I don't think that the tendency to want to plan my work and work my plan will ever disappear completely.

But when it's 4pm, the breakfast dishes are still in the sink, the boys are still in their pjs, I haven't done any personal grooming of any kind, dinner hasn't even been thought about, and zj says "Mama, PWEASE read me another story?  Just one more?  PWEASE?" I'll probably say yes.