Readjusting

I got a good bit of advice this week from The Amazing Jill. The Amazing Jill is our school secretary. She knows everything. Seriously. You can call her anytime, day or night, ask her any question you can think of and she will give you a brilliant answer. Sometimes she might even be right. We love Jill. Without her the school would come to a screeching halt.

Yesterday Miss T and I got done cleaning our kitchen early so we went up to visit with Jill for a few minutes. She asked what plans we had for the weekend and that lead to our Summer plans. Jill told us that this Summer might be hard on us being our first. "It takes some getting used to. It can be rough, especially the first one." She also told us that if we had projects to tackle to get them done right off the bat. "If you think you'll take a week off before getting your stuff done, the entire break will go by and you won't have accomplished anything. Do it now while you're used to going all day long." I think she's got a point.

Yesterday, being my birthday, I decided I would spend the day lazing around. I did do laundry and picked up a few small messes, but otherwise I crashed on the couch and watched Netflix and Glee reruns all afternoon. The FarmHands played outside until dark and came in filthy and exhausted. My plans for this morning involved sleeping in.

That didn't quite go the way I'd planned.

To me, sleeping in requires a minimum of 2 hours past the time you normally wake up.....or an earliest time of 8:30 (oh how that time has changed since we were first married and I rarely saw 10 am).  I almost made it. 5 days a week for the past 9 months I've been up at 4:45 am. Today I slept until 6:30.  I was really pushing for that 8:30 thing but Buddy Joe and two of the FarmHands had other plans.

Bitsy & #1 Son were in the kitchen and Buddy decided he's been kenneled up long enough. He started barking and my darling, thoughtful children ignored him. Mom had to roll out of bed to let him out before he woke Husband.  I shooed the kids off to their room and crawled back in bed. Apparently they didn't listen and started chatting in the living room because just as I was dozing off, Husband hollered for them to get back in their room.

That was the end of my sleep. The next 30 minutes was spent laying in bed, trying desperately to slip back into something resembling REM sleep. But the harder you try to sleep, the more alert you become. Instead I laid next to a snoring Husband and went through my plans for the day. I'm going to tackle this house.

• Beds will be stripped and sheets hung on the clothesline to dry
• The birdcage will be scrubbed and the parakeets' wings will be clipped
• Surfaces and ceiling fans will be dusted and spiderwebs will be brushed from the ceiling
• Floors will be swept, vacuumed, and or mopped
• Bathrooms will be scrubbed
• The dogs will be groomed, clipped, and bathed and their bedding will be washed
• My room will be emptied of unnecessary junk and re-organized
• Pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans and rolls will be made for lunch

Well, a girl can dream, can't she.

I often lay in bed wishing my day away in this manner. The reality is normally more like this:

• Spend entirely too much time reading Facebook updates
• Harvest, feed, and plant everything possible in Farmville 2
• Play Candy Crush Saga until I run out of lives
• Peruse Cafemom.com boards until the drama gets to be too much
• Make sure I'm caught up on The Middle and Modern Family
• Do a few word search puzzles
• Toss some laundry in the washer and forget about it for 24 hours
• Chicken nuggets will be dug out of the freezer, tossed on a pan, and fed to the FarmHands around 8:30 tonight

Yeah, I pretty well fail at the Domestic Goddess thing anymore. Maybe if I set the bar lower I won't be so crushed when I fail to reach it.

Maybe I should start off with something like:

• Feed my kids
• Scrub the bathrooms

We'll see how it goes. I'll get back to you. 

Unless something needs fertilizing in Farmville.