How To Be Two Places At Once Because I Have No Favorites

             My kids are always playing the “favorite game.”  “What’s your favorite color?” they ask me. 

“Um, yellow, I guess,” I reply.

 Maybe I’m odd in the fact that I like so many things that it is hard for me to pick a favorite.  It’s much easier for me to pick something I don’t like than it is to pick a favorite.  I just don’t have many and when it comes to my children, I don’t have any!

                As a mother of three children, the thought of my children thinking I have a favorite child is almost sickening.  It’s something that was hard to understand before I had more than one child, but I really and truly do love them all equally.  Certainly, I don’t always like them all equally, but like isn’t love and I believe it’s perfectly acceptable to momentarily not like the toddler that just bit you or the preschooler that colored on your couch with a pen.  Let’s face it; children go through stages where it’s like they make a job out of trying to get us not to like them.  It’s not fun, but even then most parents would give anything, even their lives, to keep their children safe.  I get it.

                Of course, I didn’t truly get it until I became a mother.  Right now, I’m faced with one of those things that I’ll one day laugh at as being such a small problem.  You see, my kindergartener has an end of the year program at the exact same time as my son’s preschool graduation.  The events are in different schools so there is no way I can attend both.  We’re going to have to divide and conquer and that makes me a bit sad.  I’m going to do my best to convey to each of my children that I want to be with them both.  Having daddy with one of them is just as good, but I still want to be with them!  And so it begins.

                As my children get older and begin to have more activities outside of our home, I will have to accept that I can’t always be there for each and every activity.  There is only one of me and three of them.  It certainly isn’t hard to understand.  I guess my heart is pretty lousy at math.  Good thing I’m better at making sure the batteries are charged in the video camera.    Just because I can’t be at two places at once doesn’t mean I can’t see what happened.

                What do you do when, as a parent, you want to be at two places at once?  And could someone please get me a clone for Mother’s Day?