Julie Bowen jokes she's lowering her expectations: Should we all?

by

Sara McGinnis

posted in Celebrities

Julie Bowen has accepted that her family needs some hired help on the weekdays, but on the weekends she insists on going without -- and that means lowering her expectations for how things are going to be.

Explaining why she and husband Scott Phillips go "nanny-free" on the weekend to parent their boys (8-year-old Oliver and 6-year-old twins John and Gus) the Modern Family actress told People, "We have three kids. We definitely have help during the week. But I feel like if I got a nanny on the weekends when they were little, I would have relied on it so heavily that I would have been … like, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ ”

The 45-year-old star wanton to say, "Millions of people have done this for millions of years or billions! So just suck it up. It’s not easy. Just do it, and now it’s so much easier. My husband can do it. I can do it. We got it down to a system. We have lowered expectations. They wear filthy clothing, I’m not going to lie. It’s gross."

I can see that Julie Bowen is probably exaggerating a bit in the name of humor, but perhaps this is an idea we ought to start taking a little more seriously.

You see, my boys get out of school in two tiny days and then there's 11 long, hot weeks in front of us. A part of me is looking forward to summer, because we do have some fun, but as a work-at-home parent it also tends to put a knot of anxiety in my stomach.

This year though, I'm trying especially hard to be chill. I'm reminding myself that staying up until 10 when the sun finally sets won't ruin them, that chasing down the ice cream truck on occasion is (aside from being a ridiculous waste of money) a great memory-making activity, and that every once in a while a dip in the pool can count as almost equal to a real shower. I'm taking a deep breath and resolving to go with the flow -- to put aside my expectations of how things should go and just let them happen.

Or, at the very least, I'm going to try.

We all know it's impossible to "do it all" all of the time, so perhaps it's time we embraced lowering our expectations some?

Join the conversation

What are your summer plans like? Are you easing up on your expectations?

Photos: PR Photos

 

Photos of celebrity kids out having fun with their nannies: