T-G-I-Monday

I am a good mom and I love my kids and I love spending time with my kids but yesterday during a particularly trying moment with my 4-year-old, I thought:

"At least tomorrow is Monday"

Woah, totally didn't see that coming. All those years of cherishing the weekend, relaxing and then there I was just wishing my Sunday away, but when you are on Day 2, Hour 4 of intense negotiations with a 4-year-old behaving in a completely-age-appropriate-yet-completely-infuriatingly fashion, I suppose that it is not surprising. I'm sure I'm not the first, but I think there are a few things that give me the freedom to long for Mondays.

There are No 4-Year-Olds At My Work

Now - this would seem like a given but I have worked with 4-year olds before. Here's what I mean.  

"We need to get in the car"

"No"

"We need to get in the car so we can get food."

"No"

"But we'll be hungry if we don't get food."

"No"

We're not talking. We're not communicating. One person is making a request and the other is shutting it down. We are not even getting to the task at hand because we are too busy discussing if we can do it. Now, have you worked with 4-year-olds?

I was having a few conversations in the past week about what makes functional teams and cultures and what makes toxic ones.  The output was that the functional teams skipped the painful foreplay of arguing about whether to solve the hard problem at hand, whose fault it was, whether it was actually a problem and just got to the work of solving it.

The key piece to this was banning one word:  "No" 

Here's what I mean - "No" - the answer so beautifully articulated by my 4-year-old shuts the conversation down. Now, we are negotiating, each of us has taken a stand and we have to battle to get back to the task at hand. In one of the most functional (and fun) teams I have ever had the privilege of working with, "No" was not part of the vocabulary. Instead we traded it for:

"Yes, but . . ."

"Maybe but only if we exclude . . ."

"We could try X. . ."

"I'm not sure about that but what about . . ."

"Let me think about it"

"Why?"

Not saying "No" didn't mean agreement, it meant that we were talking, that we were hearing each other and heading down a solution path and rarely did the original ask come to fruition as initially articulated but we got to the work of sorting that out right away. We got to do what we were good at doing and get the satisfaction of breaking down hard and interesting problems to get to a viable solution.

I have confidence in my kid's schools 

The other reason that I can feel okay about Mondays is that I feel good about my kid's schools. They are not perfect - nothing ever is. But, they are generally happy, safe, have made nice friends and I can feel confident that all will be well until their 6 PM pick-up.

I was chatting with a friend not long ago who did not feel the same.  She worried that the teachers weren't paying attention, that things were not clean, that they were not safe.  This is not a plan.

If I didn't trust and feel confident in where my kids were going,  then drop-off is painful, and my mind share occupied by the what-ifs all day.  

Monday Night

And here's the best part of Monday, at the end of the day, I go and pick up my kids, throw together some un-interesting and un-exciting dinner and spend the crazy, but generally amusing hours of 6-8 PM (okay - often 9) together.

Happy Monday everyone!  Thanks for reading!