How the Worst Day of Your Week Gets WORSE

6:30 AM

You wake up coughing, your throat sore, your nose clogged. At first you think, I’ll just call in sick today … but then you remember. Today is the Big Meeting.

Like it or not, you’re going to work.

On your way to the bathroom you hear your son crying. You go into his room. “My throat hurts!” he cries. Uh-oh.

You take his temperature. Yup, he has a fever. Guess he’s not going to preschool … and lucky you, you’re the only parent who’s not on a business trip today.

You drag your daughter out of bed and get her ready for school. She’s in tears, doesn’t want to go to school today because there’s a test and she’s terrified. Meanwhile your sick son is practically attached to your leg.

You get them into the car 20 minutes late … and the Big Meeting is in ten minutes.

Your kids are wailing. You call into work to let them know you’re running late. You call the pediatrician and make an appointment for this afternoon. You call around to all your stay-at-home parent friends to see who’s able to take your sick preschooler for a few hours. No luck.

Your daughter safely into the school building (after five straight minutes of bawling in the hallway), you head to work with your other bawling child in the back seat. The constant wail stops just before you pull into a parking spot. You look back, groan, and carry 35 sleeping pounds of dead weight into the building.

An extremely busy coworker begrudgingly agrees to watch your son for the next half hour while you’re in the meeting. You rush to the conference room to discover you’ve missed everything important.

12:00 PM

You have no appetite. Lunch is more cold medicine as you heat up Campbell’s for your son in the microwave. Emails have been pouring into your inbox all morning, most of which you ignore while you work as fast as you can to meet your deadline. You do your best to concentrate on your work despite your headache and the fact that your son needs you to help him find another game on your iPad every fifteen minutes.

The phone rings. Your daughter is in the nurse’s office. She needs to be picked up.

You leave work after shooting off an email begging for another day to finish your project.

You pick up your daughter, who seems to be just well enough not to show any symptoms but just sick enough to have missed her test and will need to make it up.

You head to the pediatrician’s office where you wait for twenty minutes. The kids fight. You yell. They fight some more.

The doctor prescribes an antibiotic. You drag the kids to the pharmacy, where you spend half an hour trying to keep them from taking everything they see off the shelves before the meds are ready for pickup.

5:00 PM

Finally, you’re home. You pull into the driveway, past nearly knee-high grass. You stop. The sun is low in the sky, and the weeds cast long shadows along the side of the house.

That’s when you remember the one free block of time you had to do the yard work this week was tonight. You shake your head and pull into the garage.

As you make dinner, you look out the window and grimace at the lawn. Then you close your eyes and try not to swear out loud when you remember you have guests coming over tomorrow night.

There’s no getting the lawn mowed tonight. You need rest or you’ll be in worse shape tomorrow.

You have dinner and try to get the kids to bed early. As you yell at them to put on their pajamas and brush their teeth you try not to think about the lawn. You tell yourself it’s not that important, but it bothers you.

You feel anxious as you’re trying to fall asleep. It’s that nagging sense that things are left undone …

WHAT WE MEAN BY “A BETTER LAWN, A BETTER LIFE”

We can’t keep you and your kids from getting sick, or fix work stress, or make you dinner. But with a grounds maintenance plan, we can make sure the sight of home at the end of the day is a welcome one.

To our current customers, we just want to say, “Sleep well. We’ll be back in four days.”