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?