STRUGGLING

I am struggling big time. I am highly irritated with everyone and everything and a lot of my energy goes into not lashing out at anyone who dares to breath within 5 feet of me. I am not sure what the cause is. Hormones? Lack of sleep? Needy child? I'll blame November. The grey, the rain, the cold. And the full schedule. At the moment I have one child out of 6 that does not fill my mind with worries. At least if I ignore how skinny he is these days and that he hasn't gained any weight in a long time.

Today I will be nice to myself and give myself a pat on the back for every tiny little thing. I am not sure how to find my inner balance but it is very necessarry.

My task list is hard, even the revised one. I got laundry down, and I am doing okay on blogging. Everything else? Well, needs improvement. I'll do piano today, to soothe my confused brain. Piano helps me blend out all my worries, Because If I don't I can't hit the right keys. So, attend to the baby, then play the piano and then hope the baby won't be needy again already. Sometimes I wonder what I have gotten myself in to.

So the day is over. Piano never happened. But hey. I am still alive and I think I did well. That's all that matters....

"DO AS YOU PLEASE" DAY

I declared today "do as you please day". Who cares what needs to be done. Stuff ALWAYS has to be done. And as you know by now, "do as you please" with me doesn't necessarily mean I am not working on things. It just means I am not sticking with the plan. Today for example I decided to cut back the bushes in front of the house. The weather is sunny and warm, I will just take the baby outside with me and enjoy the last few rays of sunshine. Who knows if I will see the sun again until March. Those bushes are so far down on the to do list, that if I stick with my list they will never get done. Their priority listing just isn't high enough to ever make it to the top. Something is always more pressing. As they stay on the list none the less they still weigh down on me. So getting them off might be better than to stick with the list.

BEING REALISITC

Lets face it. Dreaming big is one thing. Feeling like you failed on a daily basis is another. I know myself well enought to know that this is what it will boil down to. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not even by the end of the week. Although very likely before the year is up.

So lets be nice to myself and reduce that daily list. At least for the next couple week. Oh wait. Lets make this months, there is a tiny person in the house who needs loads of attention.

So here is the revised list.

• 2 loads of laundry (not negotiable as that is simply what needs to be done around here)
• 10 min in 1 bedroom
• kitchen at night while James gets to send the kids to bed. 
• go for a walk, work out or play the piano
• 10 min in a bathroom
• work on a blog (not necessarily posting, working on something is enough)
• cook 3 x a week and make sure portions are big enough to last 2 days

Trust me, that is plenty ambitious. 

MAKE HAY

...while the sun shines. Even if the sun "shines" at 5:30 am. Before 8 am I had the dishwasher and the washer running, dirty laundry sorted, and 3/4 of the fridge cleaned out and trust me. That was a lot of work. The additional sick child home did not slow me down.

At the end of the day I exceeded the 2 loads of laundry. I cooked lunch for all and dinner for James and myself. I got the dishwasher started again in the evening. It doesn't sound like I did all that much summing it up, but I sure felt very succesful today. 

BRAINDEAD

3 nights ago I filled up the washer only 2/3s so I decided to wait for next morning to turn it on in the hopes of filling it up. Next day I washed and dried it but never retrieved it from the basement. Just too much going on and as it was dry I figured it is safe to leave it.

So imagine my surprise when I got downstairs and saw stuff in the washer. "I thought I washed this," I said to myself. And then the memory came back. I had indeed washed it. When I was about to put it in the dryer I only took 2 thirds out as the load was heavy.I picked out the stuff that didn't go in the dryer and started it. And totally forgot about the rest of it in the washer. Seriously, if my attention span is too short to put laundy in the dryer there isn't much hope for a focused approach, is there...

ACHIEVEMENT OF THE WEEK

I ate my weight in chocolate. Well. Maybe not quite but close enough. 

I managed to do 2 loads, the walk, the blogging, but not in one day. Who cares. I am surviving day to day an am getting more than done the last couple of weeks, even if to be honest, that isn't that hard. It's hard to be happy when you constantly feel like failing. Maybe being happy should be my top priority.

DREAMING BIG

Here is the list of things I want to add one by one to do daily. 

• 2 loads of laundry 30 min each (or 10 laundry tasks)
• 2 bathrooms 10 min each
• 4 bedrooms 10 min each
• kitchen 3x 10 min
• 10 min each in living room, front room  and hall
• 15 min of piano practise
• 15 min work out
• go on walk with little kids in the morning
• blog here and on the family blog
• cook every day

A girl can dream. Right? I put them together in blocks, so the list wouldn't be quite as intimidating, but besides the laundry the 10 min segments are each considered an individual task. So is each blog. If we do the math, we will see that that will add up to at least 5 hours. That is without taking care of the needs of 2 kids under 3.  

Today I managed the laundry, 10 min in the hall, cooking and blogging. On both blogs. Oh, and lets not forget the 10 min in my bedroom and my making the boys clean up their rooms. To achieve great things one has to dream big!

TODAY'S SUCCESS

I used to have routines in place that worked well for me. But things went south over the last year and I found myself doing nothing but holding a baby the last few weeks. When I do have my hands free Is eem to be lost and don't know where to start. It is once again so mcuh, that it looks like an impossible task. So I came up with the following solution.

I made a list of things I want/need to do every day. I decided to try to do just one every day, everything else would be bonus.  Then when Imanage to do that I would add a second thing. Guess what. I failed. Every. Single. DAY! For a week. Today I found out why. My tiny starter task is do 2 complete laundry cycles each day. But guess what. This is what one load looks like: take to the basement and sort - wash - dry - fold - put away. I have done this long enough to know that whenyou add this up you are looking at an average of 30 min per load. So my tiny starter task takes a whole hour of my day. Maybe not the smartest thing to start with. 

Once again we are back to the well known fact that if you want to plan right, you need to know how much time you need to get accomplished what you set out to do.  I felt better about myself once I realized that my first step is a huge one. Splitting it up into 10 tasks (2 times 5 tasks see above) already helps. I also decided that it shoudl count if I just do 10 laundry tasks. like 1 full cycle plus putting 5 baskets away. (Yes, that seems to be the hardest task). 

While thinking about all of this I managed to complete my 10 laundry tasks. 2 full circles. And I cleaned a toilet and scrubbed a sink in one of the bathrooms. HA! Take that. I can function in the middle of crazy. I hope I can do it again tomorrow. 

SLEEP

I need more sleep. How ironic that I should be writing this in the middle of the night. I get grumpy when I am sleep deprived. It also affects my decision making. And my ability to focus. And my stamina. Plus I eat more candy when I am tired. I think I need to go to bed at 10 pm again. If I do that it will be 11 anyway by the time the light is finally off. It being dark so early should help with going to bed earlier. Unfortunately I need more sleep during the winter, too. Okay. I will stop rambling and go to bed. Everybody else in this household is asleep, I should be snoozing, too!

EVIL DESTROYER

A certain little person took it upon himself to empty out all the little drawers that I had worked so hard on filling. We ended up with a 1 h power struggle. He sobbed the whole time, but I made him clean it up. As he is too small to do it properly, having it in the right drawer was enough. Which meant I redid it once he was done. 

The mental damage was worse then the actual damage. It just once again felt so useless. Why bother? Why spend hours sorting and putting away if someone can destroy my hard work in less than a minute? I also kept asking myself if living in a constantly messy house makes my 2 year old believe this is how things are supposed to look like? Does he really think the proper way to store his clothes and toys is to put it all in a heap in the middle of his room? He has left the drawers alone for the rest of the week. I am not sure if that is because he understood that the stuff iss supposed to be in there or because he has enough toys spread all over the floor to be happy again.  I did tear me down more than I care to admit. I think I am over it at last. New week. Here I come.