January 18, 2005

It's been ages since I have written....again. This is just the reality of life as a busy mom of four. I feel like I'm always in the middle of one project or I at least have something to do hanging over my head.

Right now, for example, I probably should be cleaning up the kitchen, the family room and catching up on the laundry which is multiplying on its own as we speak. If anything, my procrastination about writing in this journal is symbolic of the greater procrastination in my life. I sent my secret santa's gift out a month late, have a gift for a dear friend's little girl's 1st birthday sitting in the hallway (her birthday was in August) and have another package to get out that is sitting on the kitchen table waiting to be addressed.

I don't really understand why the 'action' part of things seems to be so difficult for me lately. I just feel like I've been 'spinning my wheels' in so many areas of my life. My organizational skills have been reduced to filing scrap pieces of paper with important telephone numbers on them on my kitchen counters and when they inevitably get thrown away or covered in gunk I simply feel resigned to failure. I have managed to lose my cell phone and my calendar...and if I'm honest, I'm not sure where my purse/wallet are right now. This is not how I imagined starting off 2005. My big goal was organization. I even got an early start on it by cleaning the house and throwing away bags of garbage and things we haven't used in years.

The problem, I guess, comes in trying to manage a household with so many people in it. No sooner have I cleaned the kitchen floor than Aidan covers it in cheerios from the cupboard. If I clean the kid's bathroom within hours there is toilet paper on the floor, toothpaste in the sink and dirty clothes on the floor. Even doing the laundry is no longer satisfying. Ok...doing laundry never really WAS satisfying, but I digress. I can wash and fold and put away only to realize that the chute is filled to the brim again. Half the time it has clean clothes intermixed with the dirty clothes. When the kids pull their clothes out of their drawers they just toss the clean clothes on their floor and then throw them down the laundry chute.

The only thing that we've managed to really get under control is the family's sleeping schedule...and this is actually HUGE. Our house is finally quiet now by 8.30pm. It took several weeks to get this routine established but it is the one change that I desperately wanted to make that I have accomplished. The kids are now so used to going to bed early that when we went out last night and didn't get home until 9pm they were complaining about being too tired!

I guess I just have to keep making little changes and accept that overall the larger changes will come....and maybe I'll hire a cleaning service to come in once a week!