Young Baby Plus Sick Toddler

…equals I have been getting absolutely nothing done. For all of February and much of March, I’ve been achieving bare minimums, but barely. We dipped into some freezer meals (which is why I bothered to freeze the freezer meals, so, Thank you, Past Me, for doing that, at least). I like to meal plan and make my grocery lists in [usually two separate] uninterrupted chunks of focus. When I am interrupted, it takes me significantly longer to do these tasks, because I’ll forget where I was and have to redo a few steps. When I don’t have any time when I might not be interrupted, I just avoid these tasks altogether. I can’t do them at night, because my brain is too tired by then. I know it sounds like I’m making up a bunch of excuses, but trust me, when I’m in a good routine, I can knock these out in half an hour while a kid is napping and the other kids are at school, no problem. But the baby’s sleeping is still unpredictable, and the toddler, when sick, demands my attention every waking moment. Even if I don’t give her direct attention, she steals my focus, by whining nearby and/or trying to climb onto my lap. So I might as well push off my chores and hold her.

I have a really long “Want To Do” list of relatively large projects and new habits beyond my normal homemaking maintenance tasks. I recently read a book about decluttering, and I want to take the author’s approach into every single room in my house, thoroughly, one at a time. I want to start on a new baby blanket for a friend who is expecting her first baby. I want to deep clean my kitchen cabinets and replace the no-slam foam stickers on the inside corners, since most of them have fallen off, but the residual adhesive is still sticky enough to make the door stick annoyingly. I want to wipe the fingerprints off every decorative mirror and the crayon marks off every wall. I want to post on my blog more than once every six weeks. I want to plan and host a party for the families of the women in my small group from church. I want to bake our bread from scratch every time we get down to the last few slices, plus sourdough thrown in here and there. I want to establish a regular routine of exercising. I want to put new hands and clock mechanisms on the clocks in the kids’ rooms, since the current ones have broken arms that get caught on each other, rendering them useless as time-telling devices (although they still do the decor job perfectly well). I want to get a couple of new and replacement frames for some classic photos of the kids. I want to refinish our dining table and china cabinet, or maybe paint them, and reupholster the chairs. I want to read soooo many books. I want to be the sister or friend who actually sends a birthday card a few days early so it arrives just in time to make you feel special and loved. I want to do cute and fun “liturgical living” activities with my kids. I want to volunteer to bring a homemade treat to mom’s group, or dinner to a new mom. I want to pray in stillness every day.

Of these things, the only one that’s happening with any consistency is the bread-baking (although sometimes we still just buy a loaf from the store, but I have to take advantage of the limited time left before It’s Too Hot All The Time). And taking meals to new moms. I have to feed my own family anyway, and it’s not that much more effort to double it, and I want to pay it forward from the month of meals we got in December and January!

I’ve been “meaning to” deep clean the kitchen cabinets for literally months. It’s not urgent or necessary, though, so I keep pushing it off. I mean, clothes and dishes and toilets are not optional cleaning tasks, so they always get done regularly (eventually). Same with vacuuming. 

And then it’s an elementary teacher workday, so the first grader is home while the preK kid is at school, and she asks to play beauty shop, so instead of getting the next load of laundry folded—even though it’s Monday, which is Laundry Day—you sit in the chair and let your hair be pretend washed and curled and your face be pretend eyeliner’d, and then, of course, the baby wakes up, so you feed him, and bounce him, and goo-goo at him. And his sweet gummy smile makes you forget all about the laundry. Etc. So then you still have half a load of folded-but-not-yet-put-away laundry sitting on your bed at 9pm, which you notice as you try to wash your face and brush your teeth real quick before the baby wakes up again, because he’s too tired to eat but too hungry to sleep, meaning you’ve been nursing him on and off for the past two hours, laying him in the crib for the fourth time in the last hour, only for him to wake up after five minutes for the fourth time in the last hour, because No wait I was still hungry! And then he falls asleep after two minutes of nursing, again, because I mean really though, Mom, I’m so tired! Then you stay in the chair rocking him and typing blog post thoughts on your phone screen because maybe maybe maybe if you get him goooood and asleep, this time, he’ll stay asleep long enough for you to actually brush your teeth, put away that half load of laundry, switch the load that’s been done in the washer for hours now to the dryer, wipe down the table from dinner time, sink into bed, read a few lines of a book you’re trying to read before your eyes grow heavy….Knowing that more of the same awaits you in the morning.

But hey, Little Miss loved being your stylist. Toddler Dearest needs to know she is more important than dinner being on the table “on time.” Baby Boy will never ever be this small again, so it’s okay to have “soaked up the snuggles.”

Someday, I will thoroughly declutter and deep clean. Someday (perhaps?) I won’t have fingerprints on every single surface. Someday I will go to bed when I want to and wake up when I want to, instead of getting up one more time again to feed the tired-hungry baby, or to clean up a stomach bug preschooler, or at the crack of dawn with a “ready for breakfast” (read: “I need to go potty but won’t admit it but can’t go back to sleep because of it”) toddler.

I think everyone is done being sick now, spring break is over, and the kids are back to school. Excepting the semi-annual havoc of Daylight Savings, we’re back on some semblance of a regular routine. Hence this getting written. Woo! Of course on the same day, when I had the not-at-school kids napping at the same time, instead of going to put my feet up or something normal, I decided to start the hour-and-a-half process of cooking onions to make French onion soup from scratch. Like I said before, we don’t have much time left before It’s Too Hot All The Time, so I have to squeeze as many soups as possible into the few below-70 days we do have. I just love soup. Soup season is too short here in southeast Texas.

Well, a week after the writing of it, I still do not have enough time or will power to allocate to this blog post to tie it up in a nice bow. There was no outline. It’s made of three brain dump sessions strung together. But I didn’t get a single thing posted in February, so I really wanted to get something published before the end of March! So here ya go.

Happy Springtime to you all!