Friday, April 15, 2011

Ruling the World is Harder Than I Thought

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The past couple of weeks have been a crash course in time management and multi tasking. Our catering business has picked up so much that we are going through the process of expanding the company and renaming and seperating the catering portion of the company from the part that will be the restaurant one day. Happily to say by the end of this month Eight American Bistro will branch off into Private Events by Eight. It will be a full service event and wedding planning company, that specializes in wedding cakes, florals, decor and vintage furniture rentals. It's a big jump, but it's what we have been pushed into by request of our clients. My motto has always been that we will "come from a place of yes" and by coming from a place of yes we have reaped the rewards of growth and recognition.
Now my husband can't stand that that has been our motto because there have been times that I have taken on crazy request, such as booking a catering on the same day that I was to give birth to our daughter. But I have a superwoman complex, what can I say! Inevitably I always pull it off, but I suffer when at the end of the day I am a wreck of exhaustion and stress. Juggling kids, husband, family, friends and business has left no room for me and last night I crashed.
The whole week I have been juggling meetings with brides, trips to the flower wholesaler with kid in tow and preparing for our photo shoot this weekend for our new website and advertisement with The Knot.com and The Wedding Channel.com. and add into that planning a "Mother Daughter Day" with my family and Isabella's Welcome to World Party next month. So I cracked yesterday afternoon. Both kids were crying, screaming, refusing to do what I said. I was consuming sugar like it was water to stay awake. I called my mother and begged to come over to her house for some help.
Once she got home, I rolled over and she took the baby, gave her to my father, looked at my hair (which was in Celie from the Color Purple mode) and said, "You want me to braid your hair right quick?" With a deep exhale I said, "Yes, please."
Later that night on my way home, I had the car radio quietly playing jazz and was thinking to myself how wonderful it was to have my mother in my life. It brought me back to one my favorite memories of her. When I was kid on Sunday's she would clean our room, wash the bed sheets and braid our hair. So that night we would be snuggled up in clean, warm, fresh out of the dryer sheets and hair that was tight and smelled of Sulfur 8 hair moisturizer. She would kneel next to us and say our prayers with us. I just remember feeling amazingly safe and secure and that things were taken care of. Crazy that sometimes what you need to reboot isn't a trip to the spa, but maybe just to be taken care of by somebody that knows you best and has been doing it for years. When I got home, the house was clean (thank you Ian), Isaac was snuggled in our bed with my husband, and the world was alright again.