In our house, March is always CRAZY. We know March is crazy every year because of the big conference that we attend to for work which disrupts work schedules, add travel and childcare arrangements plus gives us extra work. We expect the craziness but it doesn't make it any easier.
This month I may have gotten a little over-zealous with our social (non-work) calendar. The month starts off with a bang, Gavin's birthday. Luckily I have a chill kid who doesn't request big parties and is just as happy at home with family.
I always pictured myself as the busy mom with highly involved kids in sports or other extracurricular activities but I don't think I understood the sacrifice that would/will be as a working mom.
Gavin is still taking violin lessons which are 30 minutes long, once a week. He is also participating in a weekday science summer camp, also once a week but 2 hours long (which is nice because we get to drop him off). Those two activities alone consume two nights a week for us. Nick and I also teach one evening each which means that we're booked 4 nights/week. That was busy but manageable.
Then I decided that the little ones needed swim lessons. Not just regular group, once a week lessons but ISR one-on-one, 10 minutes each day lessons. Nick warned me it would be too much. I was determined to make it work. I figured I'd be the one taking the hit on work time and I really wanted them to learn how to swim. So, I signed them up for 6 weeks. This is the 5th week and I'm SOOOOOOOOOO ready for next week to be over. It is ridiculous how a 10 minute lesson each day consumes 12 hours/week of our work time with the pick-ups, prepping, drop-offs, travel time, etc etc. Signing up the little ones for swim lessons made us go into full crisis mode where we are just getting by at work with the bare minimum- i.e. prepping lessons for our classes. Having our work day broken up sucks because it's hard to find a rhythm after leaving the office. However, we're so happy with the progress the kids have made. Ellie is a daredevil and is NOT afraid of the water at all and does not respect boundaries. She sees a pool, she goes straight to it and wants to jump in so she really needed survival swim lessons. Liam wanted to "do" something, just like Gavin does stuff after school so it's helped him to talk about something he's doing. Both are doing really well and we feel a bit better going into summer time knowing they have some water skills. But we've decided to not continue the swim lessons until summer when we have more time off work. It's taken me 3 weeks to admit it but it is too much. Gavin wants to swim too but his lessons are 2 nights a week and Saturday mornings. I'm trying to figure out how the heck I'm going to balance 3 kids' schedules when they're all old enough to ask to be in stuff. I'm hoping they end up liking the same things and we can just make ONE stop for all of them.
As if I wasn't sleep deprived enough already, I signed up for a 5am bootcamp class that meets 4x/week (M-T-R-F). It's a sacrifice but I mentally needed this. Being stressed out at work and not making time to workout were not boding well for me. I am the type of person that NEEDS to work out in order to be mentally sane and happy. Even if I'm stressed out to the max, or when the kids are acting like savages, my mood is always SO much better when I'm active and exercising on a regular basis. Exercise is my mood-controlling drug. Wine drinking was not getting me anywhere and it's not constructive for me.
I've gotten to love my crockpot even more the past few weeks. Otherwise, we may never eat real food. But yet again I've learned the busier we are, the more efficient we become. That doesn't mean that we're on top of everything. The laundry is piled up.....although that's mostly due to our dryer being broken. It works but once it's turned on, it doesn't turn itself off which means that I may scream when I get our electric bill because I may or may have not left it on all day while I went to work. We're lucky nothing caught on fire. But we've become more efficient prepping at night for the following day, the kids are learning to be responsible for their things (e.g. no one gets in or out of the car without their backpacks). All those little things add up and hopefully we learn to create these habits that will make things easier in the long run.
So, we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and everyday we literally wake up and ask ourselves, "what day is it?"....figure out the schedule for the day and then tell ourselves, "we just need to get through today" and that's how we're surviving. One day at a time.
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