Monday Morning

Common, a photo by June Vintage on Flickr.

When I worked, I dreaded Mondays.

(Although, in law enforcement, there was no actual "Monday" that began your week...just a technical day that began your strange rotation of days and hours that we called a "work week.")

Now, I rather look forward to the week beginning. It brings a organized schedule and a prospect of goals accomplished. The weekend and its cleaning, family chores and later bedtimes comes to an end and Monday is a reprieve. Monday is the cool down from the last game and the warm up for the next.

This week is our last in this place and the hard work of the pack out and clean up is done. The next weeks bring fun (Disney World! Road trips!) and family (we get to stay with both sets of grandparents during this time.) So, I feel like I am sitting on a bigger, theoretical Monday for our journey to Guyana. The not so fun stuff (traveling on a plane with a 3 year old and two Jack Russell Terriers top the list, closely followed by the having-to-live-in-a-hotel-when-we-get-there) is coming. But I have my calendar all written out, my to-do lists are in order, and I, like on every Monday, feel prepared.

I know that, by Wednesday or Thursday, I will be ready for the weekend. Goals and plans may have had to be altered. So, in this parallel/theoretical week, it will be right about the time that I am flying solo from one state to the other with the kid while the husband is eating out on the Navy's per diem in DC.

But that is how the week rolls sometimes, isn't it? And that is what makes me good for this "job" of "trailing spouse." I organize and plan. I write lists and take orders. But I am equally good at learning to be flexible when the time comes (although I recognize that it takes more effort to maintain that flexibility the older I become.) I can take command as easily as I understand how this (often rigid) process goes, moving via the government.

Just like I know when I write on my Monday morning meal plan that I intend on making a 3 course-dinner on Thursday, I most likely will be eating, exhausted, over a bowl of cereal. That may be how this next "week" goes before we get in Guyana. I have goals: I aim to exercise through each little move, to blog this transition, to take more pictures. Maybe it will happen, maybe I will just get an A for Effort.

But, the best things about Mondays? I will get another "beginning" at the start of next week.