Life Around Here

Ultimately, of course, all these posts are for me - me, in my old age when I can't remember a bit of it without help.  But this post is really for me, so I can remember where all my days went, and why I didn't earn that online master's in my free time.  Feel free to excuse yourself now.

This is how my day goes:

5:30 a.m. Wake up and check my email messages, in case there are any of vital importance.  There aren't.

5:45 Get out of bed, make breakfast, make Frances's lunch, gather snacks for Chandler, get myself dressed.

6:30 Get the kids out of bed and feed them, like so:

(I swear my kids sometimes wear clothes around the house.)

6:45 Get the kids dressed and groomed.  Some days this is more successful than others.

7:00 Leave for school.  Feed them snacks in the car because they've usually rejected breakfast.

7:15-7:30 Get Frances all squared away at school.  This should take three minutes.  It doesn't.

7:30-8:30(ish) Muck about with Chandler.  In good weather, this means visiting a playground.  We haven't done that in quite a while.  Sometimes we run an errand.  Sometimes we get coffee.  Usually, we're really early at the gym.

8:30-9:45 Exercise at the gym while Chandler goes to the gym's nursery.

9:45-10:30 Go back home with Chandler and put her down for a nap.

10:30-1:30 Do everything that needs to be done around the house that's harder to do with children present: clean up from breakfast, make dinner, clean up from making dinner, shower, do laundry, make phone calls, blog....I don't know where the three hours goes, but it goes quickly every day.

1:30 Wake up Chandler.

1:45-2:00 Pick up Frances from school.

2:00-4:30 Do something away from the house; the "away" aspect is vital.  We go to the zoo's gorilla house, the Museum of Science, or the library, but coming home too early leads to bickering, so I try to avoid that.  At the beginning of the school year, I was really worried about this part of the day, but I think it's going really well, which is nicely eating up my guilt for sending Frances to so much preschool while being a stay at home mom.  Never mind that she once wept and asked to be sent to after-school.  Ahem.

4:30 Dinner. Yup.  The children usually finish in three minutes or less (I wish I were kidding), but I try to savor it a bit longer.

5:00 Baths, if they're going to happen.  Frances got a bath every night when she was a baby.  Not any more.  Now they get a bath when I can't remember when they last bathed.  Or when they smell.

5:30 Start Chandler's bed time.

6:00(ish) Put Chandler to bed.  She always falls asleep immediately, poor thing.

6:00-7:00 Muck about with Frances - homework, reading, negotiating tomorrow's outfit.

7:00-? Check-ins with Frances every five minutes until she falls asleep.  Sometimes this lasts ten minutes, sometimes thirty.  Clean the post-dinner kitchen.  You'd think with all this kitchen-cleaning, the counters would be gleaming at all times.  They don't.

7:30-8:30  Waste time on the internet.  Read - this is rare but still happens.  I recently read at least half of a New Yorker article about the AIDS virus surviving in memory T cells and I'm currently enjoying Little House in the Big Woods, which I've never had the pleasure of reading before.  The pile of unread New Yorkers is embarrassing.  They just keep coming.  Every week.  Who has the time?

8:30 Sleep, if I know what's good for me.

Various times throughout the night:  Help Chandler back to sleep.  She has been sleep trained numerous times, but then she gets sick and things fall apart.  She's been sick since Thanksgiving, if not earlier, so we haven't slept through the night in quite awhile, at least for parents of a nearly two year old.

There's my day, more or less.  I'm not sure where all the time goes, but it does go.  What's that saying about the longest days, but the shortest years?  I guess that applies, but I also feel like the days fly by without warning.  Can't wait to get used to that feeling.  All in all, I'm very pleased with the schedule.  I worry about getting Chandler into some sort of part-time activity that I know she'll want sooner or later, but she's got to stop napping so early.  And I'm sorry Frances has such a problem spending two and a half hours of free time with me, but she'll have to get over it, because I actually enjoy our trips to the zoo and the library.  Last week, we went to the Museum of Science, at Frances's request, three times.  That was a bit much, but she knows much more about racoons and chipmunks and ostrich skeletons than I did at her age, so we'll call it a win.