Opposite Day

Yesterday was opposite day at our house.

A had proposed it earlier in the week, and kept talking about it as if it were going to happen, so when I woke up yesterday morning, it seemed just natural to go with it. In an odd twist, my husband had to go to work for a deadline and then work on a wonky toilet at the rental house, so it was opposite for him, too, since he was working on a Sunday.

We had decided beforehand that Opposite Day would include things like eating dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner, and wearing pajamas all day instead of getting dressed. Thus, pad thai was our breakfast, and we had bacon, eggs, and pancakes for dinner. It's the little things that can thrill a 5-year old and an 8-year old! I feel slovenly if I wear pjs all day, so I did put on clothes, though not until 11 in the morning.

We ordinarily strive for Unplugged Sunday, but yesterday we plugged in, baby! The day before we made a big leap into the 21st century and bought ourselves a streaming Blu-ray player, so we watched a Netflix movie in the middle of the day– Spy Kids, if you're interested, because A is planning to become a spy when she grows up. I also worked on this blog post throughout the day, which meant I didn't have to do it all after the kids went to bed, since on Unplugged Sunday we usually play the honorable parents and keep to either sneakily checking email when the kids aren't around, or occasionally saying we're "working" if we have the computer on (what liars we sometimes are... I should add we actually do try to be unplugged mostly on Sundays).

It was interesting to observe that it seemed more special to watch a movie in the middle of a Sunday because we so rarely do. And I felt myself feeling a little like typing away on the laptop throughout the day was taking away from enjoying and doing all the other unplugged things I could have been doing. It's always good to shake up the routine every once in a while as a reminder that there are many choices we've made that are worth sticking to.

There were, of course, many things we did that weren't opposite, like creating. We often find ourselves making, drawing, painting and building in either my studio or the garage on those Unplugged Sundays. And that's how we spent many hours yesterday, too. As I worked on this blog and did some drawing of my own, I was watching the creativity flow across the studio as the kids made a coral reef out of junk building materials.

One task we had decided on a week ago was that the kids' rooms needed some deep cleaning this weekend. R proposed that since we had been planning to clean, perhaps since it was opposite day, we should not clean. We countered that since the state of their rooms is generally like a post-hurricane disaster, bringing their rooms up to a respectable level of organized cleanliness was what would be opposite of the usual. I was relieved that the cleaning wasn't that bad, either; we've worked hard to not be overstocked with kids' stuff, so picking up the rooms mostly involved putting things back in the bins where they belonged. And vacuuming.

In the end, I surprised myself by enjoying it. We did just enough to satisfy A that we were indeed doing things opposite of the usual, but not so many things that it was a pain for me to participate. We may do it again sometime!