Yes, folks, it’s that bad. I have plenty to write about but don’t even know what to call it. I’m not even sure how to write about it.
I have come to the conclusion that I am under some sort of attack. I feel depressed, out of place, friendless and utterly without motivation. I looked forward to today for weeks – my second craft and hobby day, hopefully starting a tradition of craft days every other month (the first one was in May). I couldn’t think of what to work on and then when I went ten minutes early to set up, it was pointless. I was alone for an hour and fifteen minutes. My sister-in-law showed up at that point, and the wife and daughter of our children’s pastor came another hour later. My mother-in-law came shortly after them to visit for awhile, but not to work on anything. She left and my sister-in-law left shortly after that. I went for lunch and came back and still there were only three of us there. A friend of mine came in the afternoon to see what we were doing and then left five minutes after she got there. I was then left alone at three-fifteen until it ended at four. At that point, I knew that I could have left, but I was actually being productive, so I stayed until four and then packed everything up and put things back. I threw out two pots of coffee and have now just remembered that I forgot to wash the carafes out, which is a big deal at our church.
I’m stressed. I wish I could give up every responsibility outside of my home. Mike and I are now in charge of a weekly ministry that we are tiring of in our fourth year. We are not passionate about it and it interferes with our family all too often. If our kids were older I imagine it wouldn’t be so bad, but as it is, we either have to bring them all with us or one of us stays home with them and the other goes alone.
I want out. I want a break. I’m tired of saying yes because I know that no one else will do it. I’m tired of putting my efforts into a church that has practices I totally disagree with. I’m tired of going to a church where I just wish the service would end because it’s so lifeless. I hate the feeling that I have to stay, that we have to stay. I suspect that if we left it would cause a rift in our family and I just don’t feel willing to do that right now.
I’m tired. No, I’m exhausted.
Does that title sound too familiar? Well, this time it’s writing, not knitting. And it’s blogging, specifically. I haven’t quite made up my mind about it, and I’ll need more information before I decide for sure, but it sounds good right now. I write a lot during the day anyway, and if it’s an easy job to do, why not make a little money on it? The weird thing is that I had just been considering this possibility in the last few days and I hadn’t really said anything to anyone about it yet when a friend of mine said her husband is looking to out-source some articles for a website. Anyway, I’ll keep the blog up to date on what happens with this, but right now it’s mighty tempting.
We’ve been waiting for over a month for Mike’s tax refund to get here and I just checked and it’s in the bank! The problem is that it’s over a thousand dollars less than what we expected it to be. We were audited for our charitable donations, which is why it has taken so long to get to us, but I would really like to see Mike’s assessment so I could understand why it’s so much less than we thought it would be. I thought I was so careful when I did the math! If this is the case, we’ll have to rethink a little of the money distribution that we had planned out. We have five thousand still owing on our van – we’ve transferred it around from line of credit to low interest credit cards for a while now, and managed to whittle it down this far, but we were planning to pay the whole thing off with this money. We also have to get the power steering fixed in our van and my wisdom teeth surgery in June is going to cost us over eight hundred dollars. I have to say right now that a little extra income is sounding even better. Mike might be due for a raise soon, but that’s just a guess and I don’t know when it would be happening. I’m starting to think maybe it would be better not to have my wisdom teeth out this year….
I guess I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself. For now, I’ll just wait to find out whether this is all the money we’re getting or if they made a mistake calculating our return. But I doubt that…I mean, when does the goverment ever make a mistake when it comes to money? Even if they made one, they didn’t…if you know what I mean.
Bah! I need to do something else – this worrying isn’t doing me any good.
I’m going to try and keep this from being quite as despairing as the title sounds.
At the moment, I’m quite happy with some parts of my home. The dining room table is not covered in junk today, which means we can eat there tonight, as we did last night. The living room floor is relatively clean, the bathroom is clean aside from the counter and the dishes are done in the kitchen. I have a load of laundry going, rather than letting it all pile up for a whole week.
The trouble is, I have the ability to look forward a bit, and I can’t imagine it staying so clean. That’s frustrating at best, but maddening is a better word for it. I’m sure I could make do with the storage I have here if I could just get organized. I might need a few things to really have a shot at it, but it wouldn’t be so hard. Most of my reasons for the house getting so bad are just excuses, but the trouble is not knowing how to get out of the bad habits and into the good.
Filed under: Art, Environmentalism, Happiness, Home Sweet Home, Kiddos, Life, in general, Mi familia, Rants, The H Word
I try to live my life with everything in moderation. So when I diet (this comes to mind first because I’ve been doing a bit of it in the last six months), I eat as healthy as I can at home so that when I go out or to someone’s home and they offer something sweet or off my diet, I can accept it without guilt and without being rude. In this way, it is easier to stay on my diet at home..I have tried strict all the time diets and I fail within a week. This one has been working since January.
My home: I try to keep the major things done so that if someone should stop by unexpected, I won’t be horribly embarrassed by my house. I have been doing one thing consistently and another frequently that are helping. Every night, I make sure my sink is clean. I dry it out so it doesn’t have water spots (this is a FlyLady thing). In doing this every night before bed, I have to make sure that my dishes are done. This way, my dishes don’t stack up like they have been prone to in the past. The second habit I’m trying to include in my life is doing a load of laundry every time I have enough to do one load. I still make a full load by doing everything there, but by doing only one load in a day, I’m much more likely to do it fully: sort (I actually don’t do much sorting..just if some whites need bleaching), wash, dry, fold, put away. When I was doing three loads of laundry once a week, too often it was ending up left in the washer or dryer or unfolded in the laundry basket. This, of course, leads to things going missing (“Katie…do I have any work pants left?” Mike would whisper to me over the sleeping baby and into my happy dozing state..to which I would reply “I don’t know…didn’t you look in the dryer..the laundry basket..on the floor!?”..and so on).
So I’m making improvements in a few areas. Recently, though, I have become inspired to change the way I think about the environment. I may not buy into some thing whole-heartedly, but one thing I can acknowledge is the amount of garbage we produce. It’s getting a little out of hand. Sarah McGaughey’s No More Garbage blog has been my inspiration. We also recently had an art from garbage show here in Fort St. John that was really incredible. A way to reuse my garbage or recyclables and be artistic at the same time - what could be more perfect?! In a way, I was doing that all those years ago with my Creating Sara dolls…using old dolls (I never bought a new one from a toy store or anything) and scraps of fabric, nails, pins, old jewelry, etc. to make something unique.
Now I come to the problem. It is very very hard to balance creating art and keeping a clean house when your house is 800 square feet. I like my little house…in fact, I love my little house, but without a basement or a free room, my projects end up on my dining room table, on the couch, in the kitchen, and so on. I would so love to have a house with a basement and a room just for Mommy. I could spread out, have a few tables that could be paint splattered or cut into without it mattering. I could keep all my craft/art supplies in one place so that the kids wouldn’t be getting into them all the time. As it is, I have one tower with four drawers and a small two drawer unit on top right next to my desk in the kitchen. My yarn is, I think, in my bedroom closet. My knitting needles are on the coffee table in the living room, behind a picture frame. My fabric is usually in Jenny’s room, on the unused top bunk, along with an assortment of other craft items that didn’t find a better place. This means that when my kids are napping or in bed for the night, I am out of luck if I want any of the things in a bedroom. Currently, I have a half finished rag rug in my fabric container in the middle of the living room (just in case I want it while the kids are sleeping, I haven’t put it away yet), and the dining room table is covered in plastic bags in one form or another, an iron and ironing board and a number of other items that haven’t found their home yet.
My problem is that I can’t seem to balance these things…and now I’ve added another problem.
I would love to recycle everything I can, but where would I put it all? One option, I suppose, is to use one bin or garbage can to throw everything into and then sort it later (not really a great idea), but what I’d really like to do is have some stacking blue bins to keep everything in. Then the question is, where on earth do I put them?! I’m running out of room!
Just like food won’t solve every emotional problem (or any, for that matter), a bigger house won’t solve this problem. I know this deep down, but it doesn’t make my desire for more space any less real.
There are a few solutions…but all of them require time and work that we either don’t have or don’t know how to do. One is to build a floor to ceiling storage unit into my living room wall. I like the idea, but I’m not sure if it would really be worth it. We did put up some shelves when my dad came up to visit in May, but they’re up so high that anything stored there is best left there unless I have a stool to stand on all the time.
I’m griping. Meanwhile, baby is crying in his bed and there is lots that could be done around the house. Bah, humbug.
Filed under: Environmentalism, Home Sweet Home, Kiddos, Life, in general, Mi familia, Rants, The Potty Train
Well, morning came again, and my eyes were incredibly heavy. Elias decided that the waking between seven and eight routine wasn’t working for him anymore, so he moved it up to five. Ugh. Not only that, but it wasn’t exactly early when we went to bed last night, but the kids were in bed by eight-thirty. My tactic for getting Elias to sleep through the night in the first place was ignoring him. Eventually, he stayed asleep long enough for me to call it “sleeping through the night”. So this morning I tried the old way and kept drifting off to sleep in the interim times when he decided to suck his thumb. And then just as I would have the lovely feeling of sleep, he would cry. Eventually I knew I would have to get up and feed him, or I wouldn’t get any more sleep. So the last three hours I slept this morning were done with a baby at my breast. It doesn’t actually make for the best type of sleep.
On another subject entirely, I got my issue of Today’s Parent magazine yesterday and there were two articles I paid more attention to than others; one on living environmentally friendly and the other on potty training. The first obviously encouraged readers to use as little water and energy as possible, to buy products that won’t produce garbage, to use non-chemical cleaners and lawn fertilizers. The second encouraged readers (in a nut shell) to not bother trying to potty train your child until two. One part of the article actually mentioned a “parenting expert” who doesn’t recommend starting until the child is three. There was a small blurb on diaper free babies (see diaperfreebaby.org), but the rest of the article focused on how important it is to wait until a child is “ready”.
So my argument is, why not start early? So far it hasn’t harmed my daughter, and she’s closer to being fully trained than most kids at two. I think of my mehod as gentle potty training, starting early and spreading the training out over a long period of time, also not giving rewards (other than verbal praise) or punishment. I started putting Jenny on the toilet when she was around a year; using a toilet insert rather than a potty chair. We had a few months where we didn’t do much, but I tried to get into a routine of putting her on the toilet when she got up in the morning and before she went to bed at night. In the beginning, not much happened; occasionally she peed, but nothing more. She was still in diapers all this time, until around April when I started putting her in underwear on occasion. At some point when Mike was still playing hockey every Sunday night (before the end of March), she pooped for the first time on the toilet. I would have loved to finish before she turned two, as I was potty trained by eighteen months and it certainly didn’t scar me, but I decided I didn’t want to push it – Jenny is a very independent little girl. The only real defiance I’ve gotten from her has started in the last few months; the closer she got to two, the worse it was. My theory is that at home, she doesn’t like her play interrupted to go to the bathroom. We have certainly had some accidents, but with a little diligence on the part of whichever parent (or grandparent or aunt) is with her, she doesn’t really have very many accidents. She knows what to do when put on the toilet and when we are away from home, often tells us when she needs to go. She also has started to go a little in her pants and then say potty and go more when taken to the bathroom. Obviously she’s learning what it feels like when she starts to have an accident. And the big argument usually given by the “experts” on why to not train early is that it will be bad for their self-esteem. So far, so good; I don’t notice anything emotionally wrong with my daughter just because we started training early.
So back to the reason I mentioned the environmental article. If they’re so keen on reducing garbage, and one can assume that most people who leave their kids in diapers until they’re three (or older) are using disposables, don’t they realize that their theories on training aren’t lining up with their ideals for the environment? Even if people were using cloth diapers until the age of three (which I can’t imagine they’d want to do), there are still environmental tolls because of what the diapers are usually washed in.
It’s not like I’m an environmental nut, or even an activist of any sort, but really, if you’re going to have articles like that in the same issue, think about it first. It’s an obvious double standard. Environmentalists and self-esteem mongers usually both fit the bill of liberals, but here they are, directly contradicting each other. It’s ridiculous if you ask me.
I know. No one asked. That’s okay, I like to give my opinion freely. In fact, I might just write a letter. I say that every month, and I still haven’t done it. But maybe this time I will.
