Some days

Some days are not so great. Today is one of them.

1) I found out this morning that my voice students are going to be gone all summer. This wouldn't be so bad except that it is the third in a string of difficulties that have cropped up. The first was switching from a payment to a barter system. The second was a long and unanticipated "vacation" from lessons due to illness on both sides and a trip out of town. Today was the first week back (to normal, I thought) and it turns out that I've only got two weeks to work with them before they stop for two months. Meanwhile I'll be getting more and more pregnant and less than two months after they return I'll have a new baby to juggle, and I just don't know how I'll pull this off. It is disappointing and frustrating because I LOVE teaching these girls. It is something I look forward to every week and I'm sad that it isn't working out very well right now.

2) I'm tired of being tired. I want my energy back! To do homemaking the way I want to, I need to be able to devote time to my children (including specific time for preschool, play, and reading out loud), and errands, and home upkeep chores, and "extras" like gardening, sewing, and working on photo albums. Ideally I'd be able to find a balance between these, and there have been a few times when I felt like it was happening. Like, oh, right before I got pregnant with Thomas. And, well, right before I got pregnant with this little boy. Sigh. Pregnancy derails my best efforts, every time, and for at least 15 months!

I do think that my priorities at least are in order. I do a darn good job taking care of the kids. Today we had breakfast, cleaned up a bit, did some laundry, played outside, I taught voice lessons, we had lunch, watered the garden, played with playdough, and read books. I'm not at all a failure at the mothering part of life right now - it just seems like this is the sum total that I can actually manage, and it is SUCH. HARD. WORK. to make that much happen.

So when 2pm comes, and I think "ok, now I can tackle that list of things I've been meaning to do or need to do or want to do..." and then somehow I end up crashing onto the couch or my bed or (worse) slouching at the computer pretending to get something done and actually just putzing and making myself feel worse.

The fact is that I'm tired, and I don't want to be tired. I want to somehow find or create the energy needed to do those chores that have been nagging me for the past week, because I will be happier when they are done. I'd like to pull the sewing machine out and actually finish that baby blanket I've been pseudo-working-on for the past month, except that it sounds like so much effort to do it! I did finally finish the photo project I'd been working on (isn't it amazing what you can do when you suddenly have a deadline! Seriously, the tyranny of the urgent!) :) I've also been meaning to take a hard look at our "schedule" (read: very loose routine!) and change some things, but do you have any idea how daunting that sounds when you already feel like you can't meet the demands of the current one?

3) I seem to be having another skirmish in the battle with my perception of food and weight. I like food, and I can certainly enjoy special things like the birthday dinner I had last night, but day to day eating is becoming hard again. I rather wish someone would just hand me a daily menu and say "follow these rules and eat these specific things." As it is, I spend far too much time mentally arguing back and forth over whether I'm really hungry, and if I am, what I ought to be eating, and wouldn't it just be better to skip this snack because remember that the scale is going up quite a bit faster than 1 lb a week...and by the time this argument has played out I'm feeling sick from a blood sugar crash and nothing healthy sounds good anyway.

See? Some days are just bad days. But I'm going to remember that I have two more happy weeks of voice lessons, and that if the house isn't clean at least we read "What's Wrong, Little Pookie?" six times today. And I'm going to go take a look at that schedule plan after all. And I'm going to talk to my midwife about food. Maybe she'll make that menu for me. :) The laundry will get done, and tonight we'll sing lullabies to our boys (all three of them!) and life will look brighter in the morning.