On Eating Dessert Before Dinner

After a typical work week, I usually take time on Friday to treat myself to something–a cupcake from the grocery, some flowers from the nursery, a meandering trip through Target with no list in my hand. But in the last several weeks, the work and requirements of Monday-Thursday bled clean through Friday. So my Friday ritual continually got placed on a higher shelf, a little further out of reach than the week before.

This last week was much the same, and by the weekend I could feel myself doubly worn down from a cold one of my kids kindly shared with me. So I laid around quite a bit reading The Distant Hours and Nobody’s Cuter than You while curled under fleece blankets. At one point, I unwrapped myself from the blankets long enough to look at our family calendar. Doing so made me whimper as I noticed every little square sat crammed with All the Important Things. Birthdays, appointments, end-of-school activities and banquets. All good things, of course. Still, I looked across the kitchen to where my husband stood and said, “Well, I guess I don’t get to breathe again ’til June.”

Surprise! I can’t live for long without breathing, friends. None of us can.

So Monday came around and I started to settle into the work of a freshly squeezed week. I wrote a little, answered email a little. But then I felt the pull to do something out and about, to turn Monday into Friday. So I drove to the grocery and bought a bunch of purple-blue irises for $6, a chocolate bar with orange peel in it, and potatoes for dinner’s bacon potato soup (psst…this recipe is almost as good as my mother-in-law’s). I followed it up with a trip to my favorite nursery. I grazed hydrangeas and blooming crabapple trees with my fingertips and felt their buttery soft blossoms between my fingers. I ran my hand across wind chimes and closed my eyes when their sounds tinkled like the gentle high register of a piano. I looked at little garden trinkets and smiled when I found a miniature bird feeder my daughter could use to feed Mabel, the robin she named that’s nesting on our back deck.

And so with that I decided that Friday shouldn’t get all the fun, and that sometimes the best thing I can do is not to wait to treat myself, but get up and do it immediately. Or that same day. For me, this sometimes looks like a late afternoon walk around the neighborhood or posting a picture on my beloved instagram. Other times, this looks like $6 irises and a miniature bird feeder.

Every whipstitch, it’s okay to eat dessert before dinner. It’s okay to turn Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday into Friday. It’s okay to forgo the wait and treat yourself as you hit the pause button on your day. It just may help you catch your breath in a breathless season and prove that you know what? I’m worth a little kindness to myself.

Because you are.

Have a wonderful Wednesday/Friday, friends. Much love.