My Day

I keep feeling as if I'm not getting anything done, and if you know anything about me, you'll have realized that "getting things done" is my monomania; I have a burning need to be productive and useful all the damn time. So I've been trying to figure out how I've been spending my time recently.

First of all, the boys got out of school last Thursday. Before that, they both went to school (which meant I walked them down) for the 8:35 bell. Then Thing 2 got out of half-day kindergarten at 11:20 and Thing 1 got out of school at 3:05. (That's at least twenty minutes for each pickup, plus time for Thing 2 to play on the playground with his friends on sunny days -- on average, another twenty minutes.) Now they're in camp from 9 to 12 (except for days like today, when it's supposed to be 96 degrees, so we kept them home), which means only two drop-off/pick-up slots, but it involves driving, which means it takes longer.

Thing 2 is growing again, so he's eating every half-hour while he's home. And Thing 1 (roughly four and a half feet tall and over 100 pounds at age nine) is no slouch, either. So between apples (sliced and peeled), bananas (peeled), canned pineapples (opened and slopped into a bowl), dry cereal, grapes (washed), cucumbers (sliced and peeled), fruit snacks, granola bars, "unhealthy snacks," PB&J sandwiches (crunchy and cut into squares for Thing 1, creamy and cut into triangles for Thing 2), microwave pizza, juice boxes, water and juice cups, and other random foodstuffs, that's another forty-five minutes a day.

(Add in bowl-wrangling and clean-up time for another twenty minutes or so. You wouldn't believe how many bowls two boys can go through in one day.)

It's been hot, so they want to swim in the pool most afternoons, and I can't work here at the computer (deep in the basement), while my two boys are outside in the backyard splashing in the inflatable pool and potentially downing. So I have to take whatever I have on paper (usually a book to read), and go watch them for an hour or so every day.

So that's a solid three and a half hours knocked out of the potential working hours of the day, even before we get into the car and run errands. (Such as this morning, when we had to drop The Wife off at work and go shopping at the A&P.)

I just wish somebody would give me a job and get me back into a nice calm office. I can't take much more of this rest and relaxation...