you get what you get

…and you don’t get upset.

How many times do we remind our kids this?

When we’re doling out treats or they’re getting picked for teams or things just don’t go the way they want.

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

I could have used that little reminder this weekend.

It all started with the three day weekend and all of the potential that extra day provided. I didn’t want to stay home. I wanted an adventure.

A road trip.

A road trip with camping.

A road trip with camping AND a baseball game.

A road trip with camping and a baseball game in a city we’d never been to.

Yes! That’s just the kind of adventure we need. I found a state park near Pittsburgh (about five hours from where we live), booked a camp site and bought four tickets to the Pirates game Sunday afternoon.

At this point it becomes clear that I am not one for understanding odds. That the odds of all of these things going smoothly is very, very unlikely.

What can I say? I’m an organized optimist.

I carefully consider a lot of factors – the weather, the time of year, the bugs, the temperature during the day and at night, holiday traffic, how late the kids could stay up, how early they would wake up, what we would eat and where. I thought it through from every angle.

As we pulled on the highway Saturday morning with our car packed to the gills, all I could think was, We’ve got this. We’ve soooo got this.

Of course I didn’t plan to get a head cold. I didn’t think about feeling crappy the whole time and the lack of sleep due to the inability to breathe from said cold (the leaky air mattress didn’t help). I didn’t think that our section of the stadium would be the only section that never fell under the shade of the overhang and that we’d be spending the entire afternoon baking in the sun. I didn’t add up the number of hours we’d be spending in the car.

It wasn’t a disaster by any means. We had a nice enough camp site and the campground was pleasant with a lake where we did a little fishing. The weather was great for camping, and there were very few bugs which meant less worrying about a constant layer of bug spray.  We had some great campfires and walks in the woods. The boys rode their bikes around the campground loop over and over again enjoying a new sense of freedom that both Kevin and I remember from our own childhood. On game day, we navigated downtown Pittsburgh and walked across the Roberto Clemente bridge to a new-to-us ballpark. A home run was hit. Fireworks were set off.

It wasn’t a disaster, but it didn’t have the level of epic-ness, that feeling of adventure, I had wanted. It wasn’t awesome. It was just okay. (That’s a direct quote from my youngest son). When we had to leave the game in the seventh inning, because it was just too damn hot, I won’t lie, I was bummed. And when it got to the point where every bike loop resulted in arguing, we decided to pack it up, skip our morning hike and come on home.

You want things to go right. You want harmony. You want to create fun memories and joy.

But more than that you want to push against the boundaries of what’s possible. Maybe the results will be spectacular. Or maybe they’ll just be okay.

Even though this weekend wasn’t a grand slam, I’m not deterred. I’ll keep planning adventures with organized optimism.

It’s a lesson for me as much as for the kids…

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.