Yesterday was one of those jam-packed days. It started with a 9 a.m. appointment in DC, which meant an early start leaving the house to drop the husband off at the Metro, kids 1 and 2 off at elementary school and kid 3 at pre-school on the far end of town. I spent an hour and 45 minutes transporting and crawling in traffic before arriving at my destination.

By 10:30 a.m. I was back at home, plugging away at work before I blinked and suddenly, it was 1:45 p.m. … time to suit-up for my oldest’s practice 5K with her Girls on the Run group. Since I am her buddy runner for the real 5K coming up on the 15th and I haven’t run a block since the last one in December, I thought I might see if my legs still work. Although I spent most of the time cheering the girls on and showering them with colored hair spray each time they completed three laps, I did squeak in three laps of own with my daughter at the end of her race. She told her friends she was training me for the big race!

From there it was on to a springtime celebration at my son’s school with a looming threat of rain that, thankfully, never fully materialized. We arrived a 4:30 p.m., a half hour earlier than expected so we had some welcome breathing room. After helping with set up, we enjoyed the light foods and festivities as I photographed the event on behalf of the school. Suddenly it was 6:45 p.m. and time to move on.

Although it was an hour passed our regular dinner time, since the kids had been munching on egg salad, hummus, bread and strawberries, I didn’t feel too guilty about stopping at McDonald’s on the way home for a few nuggets to “fill the crevice,” as my dad used to say. It had been a long day for all of us and it wasn’t over yet … we all deserved a little treat.

As we chugged through the line at the drive through, I phoned my husband with a quick status update. We were picking up food and heading home. But, since I needed to be at a Daisie meeting for daughter number 2 at 7:30 p.m., I would only have time to drop the kids off before heading back out. We did a run down of what needed to be done once we arrived. The kids needed to eat, do homework, take showers and get the hair spray paint out before heading down to bed. The would certainly not make their usual 7:30 bedtime, but when their heads did hit the pillow, I   they’d fall right to sleep.

I didn’t even get out of the car when we pulled in to the driveway. Dad came out and brought the kids and related gear in and I headed off to the Daisie meeting. While I expected the meeting to last about an hour, once we churned through the agenda, the conversation got juicy. And, although I felt time slipping away, I found myself compelled to stay. It’s not very often that I get to hang out with a group of women with no kids tugging, pleading, whining or shouting for attention. For the next two hours, we enjoyed real life adult conversation. More about that soon.

When I got into my car to leave, I was shocked to see that it was a little after 10:30 p.m.! I had survived one of “those” days. The kinds of days we all have, some more often than others. The days were we are pulled in so many different directions, spend hours in the car traveling to and fro and transporting various people along the way. Days when we go from one thing to the next and forget to eat because we haven’t been still long enough to realize we are even hungry.

It was such a sweet treat that my day ended in the company of fellow moms, several of whom probably had days just like mine.

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