This is the summer of minecraft, nail painting and spending time with Grammy. It’s also the summer of me learning that everything is a trade-off. If I choose to do one thing, than something else that I should have been doing is going to go unfinished. Or never get started in the first place.
My job is going wonderfully well – but there’s a lot to it. A lot. And I’m still on reduced hours (in a month, I’ll be doing 32 hours a week, but until then, I’m doing 20 hours in the office, and working from home when I can). I’m grateful, so grateful, for the ability to work from home, to be able to work while my kids bike ride and play with barbies and to stop and get a snack or pour a drink. But working from home has it’s own challenges.
Yesterday, I was feeling particularly professional. So I worked, a lot, from home. This morning, I’m looking around at the living room floor, covered in books and empty cups, papers and crayons and pillows and hair ties, and regretting it. Or not regretting it, because I got a LOT done yesterday, and it needed to get done, but my house is suffering.
I think it’s mostly the house that suffers. And my kids, a little, my husband, a little. Because I don’t function well in a really messy house. For my own sanity, I need a relatively clean house. Relatively. We went to the beach on Saturday and it was beyond fabulous. The kids had so much fun, and I loved being in the ocean more than I can express. But Sunday was an epic disaster, in large part, because I was so damn frustrated by the fact that I hadn’t cleaned on Saturday. I still had dishes to do from Shabbat dinner, so much laundry to do.
I keep telling myself that it will all get better in September. I won’t have to juggle childcare – everyone will be in school. I won’t have to clean so much, because nobody will be home during the day. I won’t feel guilty because I’ll be home when the kids are home.
Julie didn’t go to bed last night until after eleven. Not that she wasn’t in bed, because she was. I got her to bed around eight thirty. But that’s her one-on-one time with me, and I couldn’t help feeling like I needed to just snuggle and talk and be with her. She didn’t want to sleep – she had a lot to talk about. So I let her, but she’ll suffer today because of it. Marc can go in later, so he’ll let her sleep for a while, and I’ll get out at two and go pick her up. She’ll sleep on the way home. Or the way down to my mother’s house.
She’s having a harder time than the other kids are. Jessie and Sam aren’t loving me being gone part of every day, but they are already used to spending that time in school. Julie is not. As much as I tell myself that kindergarten will be easier for her, that she needs to adjust to this anyway, this way she does it with my mother and her dad, which is so lucky for her, I still feel guilty.
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