Hidden Productivity

The past several weeks I've been exhausted.  It's the kind of exhaustion where I'm too tired even to read anything that has chapters.  And considering that I love to read and spend a fair chunk of my precious little free time with a book in hand, it's something that it hard for me to accept being unable to do.

My kitchen is a mess.  Should I take a few minutes to clear some of the mess away, I find when I go back into the kitchen that the small progress I have made was for naught as a bigger mess than the original one is now in its place.  I suspect that goes with the territory of homeschooling one of my children and having a husband home five days a week.  It's like shoveling a walkway in a blizzard.  Flat out pointless.

And the laundry, sigh.  I'm pretty sure Bryan is close to having no clean clothes that he can wear to the office.  Somehow Ellie manages to have clean clothes for school and I've been hacking together outfits for the baby.  I'm not sure what Madeline is wearing, but it doesn't matter since she's home, right?  Me, I just grab whatever seems to fit right.

Somehow we're managing to survive on the food we have around the house.  Just yesterday the dinner I planned to make was derailed at the last minute when we discovered that we had just enough angel hair pasta for one child instead of a family of five.  So Bryan, who we can call "my hero," saved the day by speedily dialing for a pizza.

Can I tell you just how amazingly grateful I am for God's marvelous culinary gift of the pizza?  Oh Pizza, if I had any ability to write poetry I'd slap together an ode to you!  While many other items in the pantry make me want to curl up in a dark corner of the house and hide for weeks, you are there for me.

Ah, a cool dark corner.  I would be so grateful to have some nice cool overcast days.  For some reason the sun seems to be beaming into the back of my house with an intensity that makes me feel like we're under a magnifying glass.  Ordinarily I like to let the sunlight pour into the back rooms but lately I've been trying unsuccessfully to keep it out.  It's odd, but I never realized just how hot the back of our hose gets from the sun.  I seriously feel like I'm living in a green house.

Despite my present dislike of the sun and the warmth it brings, my lack of energy to get the house in order, and our being forced to forage for food because I have not visited a grocery store in who knows how long, I am, in fact, being productive.  You just can't see it.  Much like my broken toe that is mending itself, I hope.

I have a tendency to always push, push, push myself even when I'm exhausted.  Rest, is something that I usually say I'll do when I die.  Of course, a couple months ago I thought about that and realized even then I probably wouldn't rest.  Should I find myself in the blessed company of the saints some day, I imagine that I'll busily spend my eternity interceding for others.  So I've decided that maybe it's smart to slow down once in a while and get some rest when it's clearly needed.  I have a toe that needs to heal and my present exhaustion is yet another sign that rest is what my body needs right now.  So I'm doing my best to catch naps when possible and to just rest when I can.  I keep telling myself that eventually normal order will be restored.