Comments (11)

By rebecca, May 8, 2012 1:31 pm

Life is a complete scramble right now. It’s not just the mad rush to cram lunch in my kids’ faces and pack Colum a snack and get everybody out the door in time to catch the school bus every single day. It’s not just the trying to get a six year old out of a wet bathing suit with a screaming baby and a three year old running laps around the change room. It’s not just juggling t-ball practices and games and two different swimming lessons  with dinner prep and dirty diapers. It’s not just getting them dressed and undressed and bathed and maybe even squeezing in time for a shower myself.

That’s just my baseline scramble. That stuff is expected.

It’s also the laundry and the dishes and the toys and the games and the snippets of paper and all the freaking STUFF that I can’t keep at bay. It’s the papers from school piling up on the kitchen counter and the dry erase calendar that’s been scribbled over. It’s the doctor’s appointments and birthday parties to attend and to throw and the countless other events and obligations I can no longer keep in my head. It’s the pantry jammed full of food stuff in no particular order despite my best intentions to keep it organized. Ditto for the fridge. And the linen closet. And all the closets and drawers, really. It’s the cleaning and weeding and planting and mulching and all kinds of other gardening-type stuff I’m still learning about.

It’s also this blog and the other writing I should be doing. In any given moment I have SO MUCH to do that I am paralyzed with indecision. If Mary’s napping for an hour what can I really get accomplished? A blog post? Maybe, if it’s crappy, and if I don’t also check in with Twitter and Facebook and G+ and Pinterest and my email and my other email. I’ll start to unload the dishwasher and then put some clothes in the dryer and then get Irene a snack and then start to pick up the toys in the living room and then quickly check my email … and somehow nothing gets done.

And that is the hardest part of parenting for me. The doing nothing. We go to the park and they play and maybe I play too or chat with another parent and, really, I’m doing nothing. It’s just so much waiting around. Waiting for swimming and t-ball and the school bus. Waiting for bedtime.

I know, intellectually, that’s it’s not doing nothing. I know that in those gaps, those moments of waiting and doing nothing, the best parts of parenting happen. Just being there, watching the t-ball game. Reading to Irene and Mary while we wait. Playing ball with the kids. Walking places! We do our best talking when we’re walking and driving places. It’s just so hard to be in that moment when I’m constantly rifling through a never-ending To Do list in my head. It feels like I’m doing nothing and I don’t have time for nothing!

I also know that this is magnified tenfold by the baby. So much of our at-home time is spent caring for an increasingly mobile and demanding baby. The half hour here, the twenty minutes there that I used to spend cleaning the kitchen, prepping dinner, folding laundry or even reading a magazine are no longer sufficient. Or, rather, I just don’t get those twenty or thirty uninterrupted minutes anymore. So what could be, should be and used to be a twenty minute job now takes an hour if it gets done at all. And then the sheer volume of chores and tasks and work to be done during naps and at night is just too much.

But babies grow up. In the blink of an eye Mary will be walking and talking and I will miss this babyhood. So this too shall pass and I shouldn’t wish it away before its time.

In the meantime, I need discipline and schedules and routines that work. I need organization. Please help a girl out. What are your best tips for organizing your time?

Comments (6)

By rebecca, May 4, 2012 5:03 am

Baby Mary sat in her stroller in the backyard

Watching her siblings play.

Watching the neighbour kids play, too.

I kept peeking out from the kitchen to make sure she was all right,

Smiling at how happy she was just to sit and watch.

The sun was shining and birds were singing.

Then, as if in an instant,

I’m juggling my now-fussy baby and trying to finish dinner on the stove.

The kids are inside now,

Fighting and whining and everywhere.

Ed’s caught in a transit delay.

Everybody’s hungry and I can’t keep up with the laundry or the dishes or the gardening or the cleaning.

There are bills to pay and papers to fill out and calenders to keep up and school bags to empty and fill.

Groceries to buy and breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, omg, the never-ending snacks to make.

And work is slow this week, this month, and I can’t afford the babysitter, but how do I get more work without a sitter?

And breathe.

(Or cry in the bathroom. Just a little bit.)

And everybody sit and eat your damned dinner or you won’t get any chocolate.

And breathe.

It’s just between 5 and 7pm.

Again.

Comments (1)

By rebecca, May 3, 2012 1:27 am

I’ve been sprinkling Cheerios on Mary’s high chair tray to buy myself a few extra minutes in the kitchen for the past couple weeks. She loves them and has almost mastered her pincer grasp by plucking a Cheerio between her thumb and forefinger. Well, she picks up Cheerios and also any little snippet of paper or random speck of garbage on the floor; she’s not that discriminating.

But yesterday there was most of a whole bowl full of dry Brown Rice Krispies sitting in the kitchen when I plopped Mary in her high chair. Colum has long-standing issues with sogginess and breakfast cereal and now Irene won’t have milk on her cereal either. The only problem, of course, is that nobody actually wants to dig into a bowl full of dry cereal. Gah. Why, oh why, can’t my kids just eat a bloody bowl of cereal for breakfast and be done with it? Why does it have to be so hard?!

So there’s this bowl full of Rice Krispies and I think, “Hmm.” I check out the nutritional info and the ingredient list and it doesn’t seem any worse than Cheerios. I sprinkle a few grains onto the high chair and Mary happily starts eating it. “Mary likes Rice Krispies!” I exclaim to no one in particular. I then turn around for, I don’t know, TEN SECONDS, to take the kids’ lunch off the stove and Irene dumps huge fistfuls of Rice Krispies on Mary’s high chair tray.

So there’s, like, a mountain of dry Rice Krispies on the high chair and Mary just face plants into it. Rice Krispies are flying everywhere and Mary comes up for air, grinning like no tomorrow, gumming huge mouthfuls of the stuff. She keeps going back down for more, delirious over the sheer quantity of food.

This was probably her fifth nose dive into it and really doesn’t do justice to the amount of cereal she started with.

What’s so funny, guys? No, really. What is it?