Day One: I wake up at 5AM and work at my full-time job from 6AM-2PM. At work, nothing seemed to go as planned. Whether it be the shelving I was doing not fitting correctly or dropping something and breaking it, I couldn’t get things to go my way. After struggling through work for 8 hours, I finally got home. But my oasis was short lived. I had to go babysit at 4PM. I love the kids I babysit so much, I really do. But that didn’t help when I went to do the dishes and the water sprayed off of a huge spoon and soaked my shirt. The blunders didn’t end there. I had to break up a screaming match between the two girls. Nothing serious, but just adding on to the things I wish I didn’t have to deal with. I babysat until about 9:30PM and then was free to go home and relax… not. I had to make sure my siblings had dinner, then I had to go to the gym, then I had to go grocery shopping for the house (given the fact that my mom is away and my dad had to work on continued education credits for his job). By the time I had all of that done, it was already close to 11PM. But my day was far from being over. It was my dad’s birthday the next day. With the crazy busy schedule we’ve had as a family, he for sure assumed we had all forgotten it. My little brother and I had something else up our sleeves. I had been gathering all of the supplies to make my dad his favorite: German chocolate cake. My mom used to make it for all of his birthdays when my siblings and I were younger. But now it’s my turn to step up to the plate. However, there was a catch. So my dad wouldn’t know that I was making it for him, I had to wait until he was asleep. Therefore, I began my baking expedition at 11:30PM.
Day Two: At about 1:30AM the chaos begins to quiet down. After laboring through the baking process – including but not limited to splattering cocoa powder and egg yolk all over my shirt with the electric mixer, having boiling condensed milk bubbles pop all over my forearm, and burning myself at least once on the oven – the cake and icing are finally cooling. I decide to take a nap before I need to get up again. So sleep it is for three hours, then back at it. I had to start a load of laundry for my little brother and I, then I had to ice the cake before my dad got up. Then I had to get ready for work. All of that had to get done before I walked out of the door at 5:45AM. I worked my eight-hour shift and then had to get myself to New York for softball practice. After a hot and grueling couple of hours, I had to get myself home. With the lack of sleep and long past couple days, I decided caffeine would be a good choice to keep me alert. I pulled into a local Taco Bell and waited in a long line at the drive-thru when I realized that my wallet was locked in my glove box, while my keys to unlock it was in the ignition. Scrambling to get my money out, my elbow honked my horn. I felt terrible being the person to honk in the line at the drive-thru. So I promptly apologized and explained that the beep was a complete accident to the person taking my order before saying anything else. When I pulled up to receive and pay for my beverage, the man handed me my drink and said, “You’re such a sweetheart for that. Don’t even worry about paying for the drink.” I was so grateful for this small gesture that I called my mom to tell her and smiled the whole way home.
The moral of the story: the drive-thru guy had no clue what I had been through these past few days. He didn’t know I was getting a Mountain Dew as my source of caffeine to power me for my drive home. He didn’t know that my mom and sister were in another state and that I hadn’t seen them in a week. He just saw me as the girl who felt terrible for hitting her horn in the drive-thru, but also the girl that had enough heart to apologize. Don’t let a couple bad days here and there affect your outlook, or, more importantly, how you treat others. Just remember, a bad day doesn’t mean a bad life.
