Organizing a hurricane

That's how I feel after two weeks in North Carolina's Outer Banks with way more people than I normally see in a month, much less every single day. Though it was merely hot and breezy in Nags Head, I felt as if I was happily amid a hurricane of activity. I came away from it completely in awe of the people who juggle their family's needs on a daily basis.

For starters, I hate grocery stores. For a woman who loves to eat as much as I do, it's fairly astonishing that I'd rather have a tooth pulled than go into most grocery stores. I don't think it has a thing to do with struggling against temptation. It has to do with trying to find everything on my list, waging war against the checkout lines or even dealing with the frustration when my preferred self-checkout lanes go into some kind of weird breakdown and refuse to check me out. I usually grumble from the minute I walk through the front door as I hit empty spaces on the shelves where my products used to be, all the way out the door again.

Let me tell you, when you are shopping for seven instead of one, as I was the first week, or sixteen instead of one, as I was on rare occasions the second week, I used up my quota of grumbling for a year. How do the moms in my gang do this on a weekly basis? Or any of you, for that matter? I'd have to go into counseling from trying to reorganize all the grocery stores of the world.

And then there were the excursions. I'm usually doing very well, thank you, to get myself and maybe a friend into a car and to a destination on time. I watched as my goddaughter and her sisters and their spouses juggled kids from the pool to a kayak to an adventure to see wild horses to miniature golf without batting so much as an eyelash. They were cool, calm and generally unfrazzled. As I said, I was in awe.

So to all of you out there who are doing this every single day, getting kids of various ages to every kind of activity imaginable, plus packing school lunches and watching over homework, you have my unequivocal admiration. Add in all those trips to the grocery store and you're my heroines!