Letting stuff drop

I had a student last night tell me a story about her sister who is a single mom of two girls and how she had called her crying about how hard it is for her to be responsible for everything. My student is not married nor has any kids so she was telling me how she had told her sister she was in such awe of her for all she did. Whenever I hear about a single mom I am always in awe and have so much empathy for them. I have a lot of help and I still wake up in the morning and feel like I am on a race the rest of the day until I get in bed at night. Some mornings I feel like I actually shake from all the adrenalin that I've produced on the way back from dropping the kids off at school and thinking about all that I need to accomplish while they are there. (Of course maybe coffee has something to do with this as well). Going to the gym has helped get rid of some of the thought induced energy which is good but some days I am still buzzing by 3pm.
I'm telling this story because often I describe my life as trying to keep all the ball that I'm juggling up in the air and not letting any of them drop.Of course no human can do it all and pretty much weather its what is going on with one of my kids, the house, my husband, my studio work or I guess just myself, ultimately something drops. This week it was putting the wrong cone in my bisque kiln and vitrifying a load of pots. Doesn't that just make your stomach sink!!!!
Well like most of these times I go through those thoughts of kicking myself for about a day or so and then I convince myself that I can fix it some how, which for the most part I did. I did of course something that I always tell my students you can't do- glaze vitrified work. I put those suckers in my kiln, heated them up until I could hardly touch them and dipped away...heating, dipping, heating, dipping. It was a mess. For the most part they came out but I do have some bare spots I need to re fire again and of course they are not my best looking pots beacuse the glaze is thin. I'm laughing about it now but I still feel like a lame brain. I keep thinking that some of the great potters I'm sure do these same lame brain things and if they don't...well maybe that is why they are great.
To top my week off, this morning while racing the clock to get the kids out of the door we saw one of our cats race through the house and Quaid yell "there's a bird in the house"!! Sure enough Clayton had pulled a cardinal in through the cat door and the bird was catching its breath way up high in the kitchen on a pot. Joey did manage somehow to get the bird out of the house while I shut two screaming girls and the cat in the front of the house and continued my quest to get them to school on time. I swept up little feathers this morning before going out to work. Never a dull moment here......