The grass is greener...

My three month grand jury obligation is over and I'm sad. I have much to say about the jury experience in general that I plan to blog later if I ever catch up at work. But the highlight of these last few months has been the three weeks I got to be a stay at home mom again. The jury schedule allowed me to wake the kids at a reasonable hour, drop them off at school, pick them up in the afternoon and really spend some time with them. I even had time to make the beds, make dinner and actually exercise every day. (Can you imagine? :) )

There's no point in being melodramatic about it. My homemaker days are over and, grudgingly, the kids and I have come to accept this. But these few weeks have really shown me all that I have been missing.

The thing is...I was really good at being a housewife. I loved entertaining. Barbeques, birthday parties, holiday open house buffets. If it involved food, I could host it. I would spend weeks poring over cookbooks, planning shopping lists and trying every conceivable furniture arrangement that would allow me to fit a few more people in our tiny house. I would usually spend one full day on the couch afterward to recover but I loved the whole process nonetheless.

My house used to be really clean too. I washed baseboards...seriously. These days, I'm not even sure if this house still has any. I cleaned windows twice a year. And yeah, the house only has 9 windows but they haven't been touched since 2004 and I'm starting to feel guilty about it.

I used to cook...like every day...multiple times per day. I actually made my kids breakfast bars. The kind that had real ingredients and no corn syrup. I used to laugh at all the convenience foods available at the grocery store. "What kind of lazy mom can't make her kid a PB&J?" I wondered. These days, I throw that premade Uncrustable in the lunch box and wonder how I ever survived without those handy little bastards.

What I mourn most of all is the time I miss with my girls. I'm not romanticizing being a stay at home parent. I remember all too well the mind numbing boredom of having no one to talk to over the age of 4. I remember the cabin fever that would overwhelm me in the winter when we literally did not leave the house sometimes for DAYS. But all that, to me, was a small price to pay for the opportunity to raise my own children. I knew every minute detail of their lives. I do believe in the concept of "quality time" but "quantity time" has it's benefits too.

Whenever the kids get nostalgic about "the way things used to be", I remind them that families everywhere have working moms and that, like it or not, we have to play the cards we're dealt. That's probably a lesson I need to remember myself, I suppose, but when Kaylee said "Mom, I wish every day could be jury duty day." I just said, "Me too baby. Me too."