September 26, 2013

Housekeeping & Motherhood Don’t Mix

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This is my living room/office/dining room/main living area.  I know…hush.

I will not lie and say that it usually never looks like this.  Actually, I won’t insult either of our highly intelligent minds by saying anything other than:  it looks like this most days.  Truth.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to add that when my home is clean and tidy, we almost don’t know what to do or where to sit.  For real.  As in “don’t you dare sit there, I just fluffed all those couch pillows” or “don’t even think about taking crackers out of this kitchen!”  Look, keeping it super real over here - I don’t have a very good gauge for how to have a happy-medium in all this.  I just know that my house runs two temps and two temps only: Company Ready or Hazmat Zone.  Ok?  Ok.

I keep reading a lot of blogs and articles about this very topic.  Lately I’ve seen a lot of people gently massaging various ideas into our heads about homemaker/motherhood stuff.  The clean house vs. spending time with your kids vs. free play vs. organized structured life living.  It’s all very sweet.  Nice thoughts about how the motherhood struggles are “holy ground” or that it's a holy experience raising kids and keeping house and all that.  How “chores can wait because blink and your children will be gone”.  I’ve read posts meant to placate your guilty mothers hearts out of the kitchen and onto the floor for a game of Twister.  Want to bond with your kids?  Garden together.  Bake together.  Pinterest 5,000 ideas to make you feel inferior and then do none of them and feel even worse.  I’ve read articles claiming that if I would just organize a chart into four even sections and assign duties accordingly, reward judiciously, and praise abundantly – then I would find my home tidy, my children obedient, and my heart happier.

September 14, 2013

Sickies

I'm still alive and currently WITH my gallbladder.  I've steadily gained back my "feel goods" and for the most part I'm feeling normal again.  See, that's the thing with Mr. Gallbladder though.  He strikes when you least expect it.  Usually at 2am.  So we're just waiting....a little bit...and waiting some more...

In the meantime, my little Keira has had a rough day!  She was tired.  She was whiny.  She was cranky.  We were like "what's your prob, kiddo!?"  Maybe in a snarky annoyed kind of way.  Ahem.  Because we were like, she's FOUR.  So, yeah...

Well, turns out: she's got a fever, and has the blahs and let's just say - for a kid who is so incredibly healthy all the time - it sent this mama into a tailspin.

And the MOTHER OF THE YEAR AWARD GOES TO.......

September 4, 2013

Over it

I know you thought you lost me there.  Came back to post only to disappear again.  Oh no, you didn’t.  I was just sitting in my own little purgatory for the past few days.

My goal was precise: get Quint settled in Kinder, get my house back in order, catch up and organize my workload, settle back into a routine with my little gal at home and start prepping for a packed school year in the forecast for Anton AND Quint.  That was my plan.  I LIKE plans, friends.  They make me happy and feel like I have my arms around things.  Plans and lists are like my happy place.  And I had both.  Little lists and little plans all over my desk.  To boot, we even had a three-day weekend to extend all of that organizing/preparing goodness. 

It started great!  The house was coming together (don’t ask what the Summer months do to my house…it’s just a filthy shame).  The workload was right on track.  Keira and I were getting a rhythm.  Friday arrived like a blink and suddenly it was sweet family time.  We were all exhausted and cocooned in, hunkered down eating AB’s yummy food and watching movies together.  Saturday, we worked all day on the house and those sort of chores you put off for months.  I was in heaven!  Sunday was the same.

And then.  Oh sweet mother…