What do you do when you have a 6:30pm soccer game (an hour away at rush hour!), and your husband is working late? Why, you take the kids of course!! And half the toys in your house, a bag full of snacks and iPads. And you stop at McDonald’s on the way for Happy Meals. And you promise them that if they are good while Mommy was on the field, you’d buy them an ice cream treat on the way home. You do what you gotta do!
You make them run around before and after the game, as well as at halftime to ensure tiredness. It also helps if your friends bring their kids too!! Especially when you are on a nice turf field with no goals, and a half an hour after game time you have to pack up your camp and drive to an unlined field in town that has goals and set back up again.
You get to play your game, get a win, and you have well-behaved children while you are doing so. So at 9pm, you drive back to the same McDonald’s and order milkshakes and flurry blends. You don’t care that some ice cream and M&Ms got spilled and dried into your van seat. You don’t care that there’s Happy Meal garbage everywhere. You don’t care that the kids stay awake all the way home because they are just being so dang good in the car! You even say yes when they ask you if they can take their iPads to bed at 10pm because you are just thrilled (and surprised!) that they were so well-behaved for you the entire long evening. Because you got to play soccer. Because you didn’t have to worry about them.
Because life has gotten a lot easier in the last couple of years. Because it’s never going to be easy, but it certainly gets more enjoyable.
Quads Make Seven 