Well the family has come and gone, the county fair is over, both parties I hosted at my house are past, and I’m exhausted. The fear that my house is going to fall back into shambles is looming over my head. I worked for a week to get it in ship shape and another week maintaining it until all was said and done, and once my siblings pulled out of the driveway Sunday afternoon I collapsed. I was done. The last two weeks had caught up with me and my body would do nothing else. There was no nap though because baby girl slept through lunch at the pizza place and was now wired, though Joel offered to watch her I had a new laptop to check out (Joel surprised me with a new one on Friday!) Now I have spent my whole week playing catch up and I feel like I’m not gaining any ground. It seems like the only time I can get ahead is if the girls are out of the house and I can just plow through.
The problem is, I want to be able to maintain my house without having to send my kids away. I want to be able to spend time with them and have fun and still have clean clothes and dishes to eat our meals on when we need them instead of washing them as we need them. I want to be able to blog, and volunteer, and read, and nap, and garage sale, and sell things online, and make my own bread, and garden without feeling like the house and the laundry goes to hell in a laundry basket. I don’t expect a perfect house, I have three girls five and under after all.
So my question is “How do they do it?
How do these mom’s manage to keep their house running, enjoy their kids, homestead, and work from home and still sleep? This isn’t a pity party, I’m just trying to be real. I’m searching for answers. I know if I started reading some blogs and such I could find the answers but let’s face it, I don’t have the time to just sit and search. I really don’t have the time to be writing this blog post right now but I’m doing it anyway because I need to get out of my own head space for a little bit.
I’ve thought about what I can cut out but most of what I’m doing is just life. I’ve just added in getting up early and walking in the mornings because my new midwife informed me that the best way to induce labor so I don’t go so long ( Lucy was 43 1/2 weeks) I needed to be walking 4-5 miles a day by the end of the pregnancy! Obviously I can’t just jump into that at the end when I’m huge and tired, so I’m starting now with 20-30 min or about 3/4 of a mile. It’s something I NEED to do and I’m enjoying the alone time in the morning before the girls get up, but it’s one more thing.
I sometimes wonder how mother’s back in the day managed to wash all their clothes by hand and hang them out, tend the animals and the garden, churn the butter, grind the wheat and bake the bread, preserve all the food, make their clothes, and so much more, all while caring for their small children and no technology to entertain them. I’m sure their children became involved, even responsible for some of the smaller chores at a much younger age then we would with our children, and I’d like to start involving my girls more, but the question is how? And since I don’t have time to stop and create a game plan, the cycle continues.
What’s going to have to happen is the girls are going to need to go away for a couple of nights so Joel and I can regroup before the fall and get some bigger projects done that are much harder to do when you have children interrupting you ever 2 minutes. We need a breather with each other. We don’t need to go away, just feel some sense of accomplishment and get on the same page. We need a new game plan before this baby comes and we need some time to pray and seek God as to where He is leading us next. Hopefully that can happen next month, after VBS is over.
Now it’s your turn. You can either post a question in the comments below or you can generously share with the rest of us a tip or two (or three, or four, or five), big or small, that helps make your life less crazy. Any and all suggestions are welcome!