Priorities

In my early to mid-twenties, I sat with my best girlfriends and created a "30 Before 30" list of things I wanted to achieve before turning 30. It was full of short and long-term goals, some crazy and lofty, others benign and mundane. I can happily say that most of the items on the list were crossed off before the big three-oh. Lose weight and keep it off. Check. Travel to Ireland. Check. Run a 5K -- ha ha, quadruple check! Go to the grand opening of a supermarket - wait, what?

Ok, so that last item wasn't on the official list. But sure enough, today I found myself excited to be at the grocery recently built close to home with a large organic section! Olivia and I roamed the aisles, oohing and aaahing over the product selection and delighting in the free samples. When I left and called my husband to gloat, I had an epiphany. Did I really just become giddy over this? So I reflected. I started keeping a running tally of things that I've done that would never, ever have made that list. Or any list. Not even a Bucket List.

For instance, I recently wore - to a night out with my best girlfriends nonetheless (same ones noted above in case anyone is keeping tabs) - a pair of pants that became marred by strawberries. In a flash, out came the Tide-To-Go pen and whoosh, gone went the red blotch. Former Me would have gone home, sprayed the spot with Shout, and dumped the pants in the washbin. New Me set them aside on a dresser, too lazy and tired to even fold them... and then wore them again. I am ashamed to admit that I wore those pants TWICE MORE! In fact, on one excursion, some spots of blood rubbed off from Liv's scraped knee during a Mommy's-kisses-make-it-better moment (thank you again, Tide-To-Go). And I wore them again! I continued wearing them after chalk marks and dirty footprints (another snuggle moment), until finally, while shopping at Target, I realized the pants needed to be washed. Desperately.

Which brings up another did-I-really-just-do-that moment! I took my 16 month old daughter to Target... at 8:30pm. She blissfully ran around the toy section while I, laden with a box of Pampers, organic cookies, and two more sippy cups, followed behind praying that she would lose steam and go to bed without screaming. How? How did I get to this point? How did I become one of those moms? The ones that take their kids out shopping at bizarre hours; the ones you look at and silently think, "My kid will be in bed by 9pm on a weeknight!" Well, I'll tell you! You become her when your child decides she is anything but tired between the hours of 7pm and 9pm, and when you go to lay her down, she screams bloody murder, but your windows are open because for the first time in what feels like forever, it isn't 100 degrees and you don't have to run the air conditioning, so everyone in your new neighborhood can hear her tears piercing the residential nighttime quiet. That's how. That's why you take your alert toddler to run around the large aisles and expend energy trying to get a large ball from a tightly packed rack. And that's why you stop caring if your pants are clean. Apparently God also had a message for me because my arms were too full to splurge on the new Jennifer Weiner book. Sigh. But success! She fell asleep sans misery.

And did I mention that I haven't had a hair cut or color in over 3 months? Somewhere my 21 year old self is hiding her head in shame, silently screaming. Poor thing.

Good thing the 30 year old me told her to shut up and deal with it.