Gold Stars & Gold Boots

I have two baskets of clean laundry sitting on the floor ready to be put away (that the hubby lovingly washed, dried & folded). Scratch that, there are THREE. The final remnants of the the yard sale (2 months ago?) are still on the porch waiting to be dragged back upstairs and sorted. And this weekend I have to find a new place for a bunch of furniture we are inheriting.

But none of that was on my list this morning to accomplish, and what was I totally knocked out of the park, so gold stars and celebratory dances all around!

The moral of this story: set reasonable goals. Today it was mail the bills, make a bank deposit, pick up some jackets my debate kids ordered, and pay the Target bill in-store. It was fairly lengthy considering I had just a few hours and TC in tow, but I was optimistic. When I got in the car I had to add "get gas" somewhere on the list, and later in the day "call the cops on the crazy lady in the semi truck who wouldn't get out of the turn lane and then got out of her truck and yelled at me" (for "being rude" when I honked at her after the 3rd cycle of the light she blocked a whole line of cars from our left turns as she used it for her personal parking lot without her flashers on - "Can you drive this truck?" she yelled, to which I replied "no, and if you can't either, get out of it!")

Anyways, there will always be stuff that doesn't get done. A freaking ton of stuff. And new stuff will show up out of the blue and demand immediate attention. So I triage, and only worry about a few things a day. One day all that was on my list was to refill the soap dispensers. Were there 10,000 other things that should have been done? Absolutely. But I wasn't going to get that many done, especially not while sick and wrangling TC. So I set my sights on one thing, got through it, and everyone survived the day and felt good about it. I'd much prefer that to having all 10K on my list and feeling like a looser every day when I don't make measurable progress.

It also opens up the opportunity for "extra credit" gold stars - I knew eventually The Cupcake needed boots, and I've been putting it off (not on the top of the list yet!) but while at Target we wandered past some and had a moment to try them on and figure it out. TC has yet to let go of her new sparkly gold boots without crying (the poor Target cashier did try her best to get them back quickly) so I think they're a hit. On a related note, kids' boots are ridicuously expensive.