Five Things to Remember When Your Day is Going to Hell in a Hand Basket.

It’s only 4pm, there is still another four hours till bed time, and things couldn’t get much worse.

You bite your lip and try not to lose it (again), but the yoghurt dripped all over the floor, and the whining about it being ‘not fair’, and the fighting over who sits where on the couch sends you over the edge. So much for the not yelling thing.

You are having one of those days.

The kind of day where nothing goes right.
The kind of day where you’d like to crawl back under the covers and pretend you don’t exist.
The kind of day that seems to last forever.
The kind of day that makes you sure that you were just not cut out for this parenting gig.
The kind of day that is going to hell in a hand basket – and that’s a polite way to put it!

So what do you do when you have one of those days?

Well after I’ve yelled a bit, and apologied a bit, and cried a bit, and tried to crawl under the covers and hide for a bit… after all that I try to pick myself up and keep going, and these five little phrases always seem to help.

 

It’s never too late to start the day over.
It really is never too late to start over. Do something fun, or silly to change the mood, or take a break till you can find some peace, then let go of whatever was driving you bonkers as best you can, and start over.

 

It’s just a bad day, you are not a bad parent.
Everyone has bad days. One bad day will not scar your child for life, I promise.

 

You are not your feelings.
You are just not. You may feel angry or frustrated or like a failure, but they are just feelings, they are not you, and they will pas.

 

This too shall pass.
Your feelings will pass, this phase will pass, this day will end. Hang on as best you can until everything passes.

 

Will this matter so much a year from now?
I know it seems huge and horrible now, but will it seem so huge and horrible tomorrow? next week? next year? I know it may take some convincing before you believe it, but most things won’t be such a big deal once some time as passed. That doesn’t mean it is not important now, but it does mean it won’t last forever, and there is light at the end of the tunnel.

 
None of these little sayings will magically make the hard stuff go away, but maybe they will help you hang on till bed time, or at least not feel like a total failure.

If you want a visual reminder I’ve turned these five ‘bad day quotes’ in to free printable notecards.

Download them here, then print them out and stick them somewhere you’ll see them when you need a pick up, or send one to a friend who is struggling.

We all have bad days, lets help each other get through them.

This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. If you are printing on US ‘letter sized’ paper be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.

How do you keep going when you’ve had a bad day?