Do you ever feel like you can only do two things really well but never three?  That’s me. Every day.

I can juggle parenting and a career but not my health. Or I can be really good at being healthy and stay on top of my job but I suck at parenting. OR I can be really good at keeping a perfect house and being a great friend and neighbor but that’s the day I email all my clients all the wrong files or my laptop blows up. Or I screw up at my love life… etc etc…

And so it goes. There is always one ball dropping from my constant juggling circle of things to do. I’ve just come to accept it. Three things go up, one will down in a big fantastic fail.

Yesterday was one of those days when I dared to try to do three things well. I exercised in the morning. I did all my laundry, I got all the household shopping done (and back to school shopping done too. SCORE!). I was even cooking dinner AND answering work emails in a timely manner. It was a great day!! What could possibly go wrong?

Heh.

Let’s just set the stage with the fact that my apartment progressively heats up from 3pm on.  We don’t have any shade on the west side of our building and when the afternoon sun beats down on the stucco, it turns our upstairs apartment into an adobe oven. This is usually about the time I start cooking dinner. Go ahead and visualize me as a hot sweaty mess.

But I persevere, right?  I am good at channeling my inner Penelope Cruise who works in the back of a Mexican restaurant washing dishes as perspiration sexily drips down the back of her neck. Mind over matter and all that. I can do it because I am the super parent who can juggle her career and run a household and cook a delicious dinner. Let’s just make it super challenging and invite my boyfriend over for dinner too. I am woman, hear me roar!! I love to taunt fate.

I can’t really share what exactly went down because I have to respect the privacy of a certain little person in my house who has a say in what I blog about these days but let’s just say it involved me losing my temper fantastically and some lime green Jell-O. It was not pretty.

I’d love to say that it wasn’t pretty because lime Jell-O got smeared into my beautiful white carpet but that didn’t actually happen. No carpets were ruined. All the Jell-O stayed in the bowl. Just me and my perfect composure went out the window. Penelope turned into Linda Blair and I completely lost my cool with my child.

I am ashamed. I am embarrassed. I can’t believe I lost it over Jell-O!!!  Of all things.  It was a moment that I will look back on and hopefully learn from. I’m writing it down so I can refer to it in the future. The Lime Jell-O day.

Thankfully, I have some really supportive people in my life and they somehow managed to stitch me back together. I muddled through dinner. My kid doesn’t seem to be too phased and I’m back to juggling only two balls. I don’t think I’m going to try three or four again for a good long while.