A friend of mine recently flew with her six-year-old son Ryan across the country to visit her mom. Grandma had been looking forward to their visit for weeks. Ryan was excited to spend time with Grandma and his East Coast cousins. And my friend was anticipating a long overdue visit with her family. Then the unexpected happened. Ryan got a fever on the plane and spent all four days there in bed with a bad cold. There were no visits, no family meals and no games or play dates because Ryan was contagious and needed to sleep. Then to make matters even worse, the plane home was re-routed and delayed.Welcome to the world of Plan B Parenting that world where perfect plans and little peeps plummet!How do you handle it when your routine gets disrupted because of your children? What do you do when your kids force your plans to go south? Truthfully, there are only a few options. You could have a meltdown simply fall apart and become useless. You could get angry and start the blaming game. Or you could buck up and cope the best way you can.Its not that its easy. Sure, parenting is full of joy and fun. But it also has its disappointing moments. Even though we might like to be in control, of course, were not. Youll remember that you werent in control when your children were born, so theres no reason to think you could become the commander of a perfectly ordered life afterwards.
Here are 5 strategies to shift your day when it starts to take a course of its own.1. Shift your perspective. Lets say youve planned a dinner party for friends and have bought ingredients for a complicated, gourmet meal. The day of the party the day you had planned to prepare the dishes little Johnny gets sick. You sit at the doctors office for an hour, you get stuck in traffic coming home, you spend time soothing your son because he is so uncomfortable. And suddenl! y you do nt have time to cook the dinner. You could panic, get snappy or move so fast you start to break dishes. Of you could shift your perspective, pull out the Plan B Parenting motto and say to yourself, Lets not take everything so seriously here. Its only a dinner party. My advice? Get carry out or order in pizza. If your friends dont understand, they probably arent very good friends anyway. And you can always reschedule the gourmet dinner.
2. Practice flexibility. Learning to adapt and go with the flow is probably the most widely used parenting skill in the world. The only things thats constant with kids is change, so parents need to be prepared to switch plans at a moments notice. On Halloween a young mom I know had the perfect plan for her kids. First, they all went to the hockey game of her older son, then they were planning to go trick or treating. Theyd even invited friends to go along. All was going as planned until her son fell on the ice toward the end of the hockey game and broke his arm. She now had five kids in pirate, witch and pumpkin costumes and a sixth with a compound fracture. She stayed calm, pulled out her Plan B flexibility skills and adapted quickly to the new situation. Within minutes she shuffled five little goblins off to a friend, and while racing her son to the ER, she made overnight arrangements for the five trick or treaters because she feared their hospital visit would run into the night. She was a master at flexibility, a parenting trait that makes her kids feel safe and secure because they know mom can handle anything that comes up.
