Gaining clarity from delusion

I'm sure this probably seems incredibly odd, especially since I have actually blogged in the past two days, but I miss the time I used to carve out to blog more regularly.  I'm really not sure what has been happening to my days lately, but they feel like they pass by in the blink of an eye.  Perhaps it's all the little things I've been doing to fill my time that make it seem that way.

My delusional thoughts from the summer that I'd have more time than I'd know what to do with while both kids are in school for a full day have proven to be dead wrong.  My mornings are rushed as I scurry to get the girls and myself fed, showered, dressed and out the door.  Thanks to inconveniently staggered start times I get to fret about how late Ellie will be for school on a daily basis.  Madeline cannot be dropped off until 8:40AM per unreasonable public school rules.  Inevitably I get stuck behind the over protective concerned parent in the drop off line at least three days a week.  These parents are the kind who cannot drive away from the loop until their darling little child has entered the school building and are totally out of the parent's line of sight.  They drive me insane as I watch the minutes tick by on the clock as Ellie's prospects of getting to school close to starting time quickly fade.  While I'm not the biggest fan of sending Madeline to the public school I am confident that when I drop her off and speed away drive to my next stop that she is safe and under the competent supervision of the four educators who are stationed at the drop off line.

Once I get Ellie to her school I scurry her off to her classroom door.  Now that she's a big kindergartener she has decided that she's really too big and cool to hug and kiss me goodbye when her classmates are around.  So on an almost daily basis my baby is trying to thwart my attempts to say goodbye.  Clearly it's time for a new model who needs me and isn't embarrassed to admit it.

Most days I go home and do what I can to get the house cleaned and in order.  Some days I wonder why I bother when I know the house will start to revert to it's current state as soon as Ellie followed by Madeline and Bryan return home.  I realize now that my hopes for an immaculate home are nothing short of a pipe dream.   After nine years of fighting a losing battle to have a spotless home I am starting to come to terms with the fact that having a perfectly kept home will likely have to wait for a different season of my life.  And as shocking as this revelation has been for me, I think I can accept it.  I'm still going to try to attain an more orderly house, but I'm not going to fret when the house doesn't look perfect.  Once when I lamented to Bryan that I wanted the house to be perfectly clean all the time he laughed and told me that it's not going to be clean all of the time because we live here.  He wasn't telling me that we're just a bunch of slobs who can't or won't pick up after ourselves, which is how I interpreted his statement at the time, but rather he was telling me to stop running myself into the ground trying to attain the impossible.  Yes, the house can be clean, but as long as we're living life to the fullest we're not going to have a house that looks like it belongs in a magazine.

And the mystery of the vanishing time?  Well, I've come to realize that maintaining the house, volunteering for school and church related things, and taking the girls to and from school take up a lot of time.  I have the odd hour or two here and there during the week, but I simply don't have hours of my day that are devoid of activity.  I thought I'd have time to sit and watch a documentary here and there or read a book but so far I haven't had that kind of time in almost two months.  As crazy as it may seem, I think I have more time and more flexibility when the girls are at home.