It is summer, obviously. We have moved from one State to another and gotten mostly unpacked and organized (by "unpacked and organized" I mean that we've unpacked enough boxes to find enough of our stuff to function well enough to ignore the remaining boxes). I look around the house at the furniture that is sitting exactly where the movers put it and I shake my head knowing I still have a lot to do.
Add the "a lot left to do" items to the rest of my to do list and it's verges on overwhelming. I know I'm no different than anyone else -- we're all busy, but when I write it down, there really just aren't enough hours in the day. Here's a partial list: (I'm not going to write down the obvious -- get up, shower, brush teeth, make bed, etc. things but those are also being done)
1. I'm really trying to spend a lot of QUALITY time with the kids -- at the parks, the pool, walking, rollerblading, biking, playdates, etc. Quality time means not bossing, cussing, or yelling at said children... that's hard sometimes cause these awesome kids of mine just need to be yelled at and bossed around. And I have to cuss now and then so I can add money to the cuss jar -- Madi knows that is her ticket to Disney World...
2. Then we have grocery shopping (you know, the thing I hate nearly as much as ironing -- no Peapod Grocery delivery here!) Its bad enough doing this alone, but add two kids and our shopping experience sounds something like "hey mom, let's get this", "aw, mom, you never let us get...", "will you buy me _________ (insert anything and everything here", and I could go on but I digress.
3. Before I shop, I have to make my weekly menu. I have realized quite recently (this morning in the shower, actually) that I really need to include all three meals of the day to feel completely on top of the food experience in the Richards household. To date, I've only been including dinner. So I'll be tweaking the menu-writing task just a bit to include all three daily meals. This process involves flipping through recipes, balancing the food groups and organizing the "meals of the week" so we don't have chicken two days in a row. I actually like this part of the process. It helps me stay organized, helps me focus on what I need to get at the store since I only buy what I need to make the menu items each week, and it save me bucks since I'm cooking and not buying pre-packaged prepared food or other items we don't need.
4. Cleaning: bathrooms, floors, carpets, dishes, laundry, sticky finger marks off the walls, doors, light switches MADI (read *yell* since my sweet princess is the sticky fingered wall toucher in our home. Did I say that sticky messes really, REALLY get to me?)
5. Bill paying, letter writing, claims filing, etc -- all the fun and wonderful things we get to do just by virtue of the fact that we are adults who own a home. Add to the "normal" things, the other moving-related things I've been doing this past month and this takes it up a notch. The weeks following the move have been filled with service people installing this or fixing that. I'm still waiting for the plumber who is coming "today" (since it's 6pm on Friday, I've reconciled that he's not really coming today) to install the battery backup for the sump pump... don't want the basement to flood now, do we? And other fun service-related things like that.
Now I know there are many more things than these few that fill the day and frankly, I could go on writing and writing and writing.... but there's not time. I'm going to post this and get back to my "to do" list. Au revoir!
