What a Life!

At play group Friday, Ben spent the entire hour driving a car and talking on cell phone.

Please do not ask me where he got this idea. His seat is still rear facing, and I do not spend much time talking on my cell phone while I drive. I think it’s more that he really liked the car and he really liked the cell phone. We use cell phones exclusively at home, so he always loves playing with toy cell phones when they are available. It’s still funny, just the same, that he already knows how to talk and drive.

I was watching some documentary on tv recently – maybe it was the show on A&E about the people who work at the mortuary. I’m not sure. The point is they were planning funerals and burying people. One of the deceased persons was of some Eastern religion – Buddhism or something like that. Sorry I don’t remember. But they had two caskets – one for the person, and one for all the things they needed to take with them to the “world beyond.” These items included everything from personal possessions such as clothing to canned food. It was a serious entourage, let me tell you!

Every evening I am reminded of that because when it comes time for Ben to go to bed, he takes his entourage with him. His sippy cup. His favorite stuffed bunny. Raggedy Andy. Those are the regulars. And every night there are others who are included as well. Sometimes it’s the xylophone…the plastic puppy dog who barks when you pull him around the house…even the empty bottle of Windex that he likes to play with has been included in the Entourage.

Steve is usually the one to put Ben to bed. The routine begins with putting his night clothes on. Then you read a story. And then the Entourage is gathered. If I’m working downstairs, there’s always at least one toy that Ben has to come downstairs to get. He always starts with one of his favorites, such as the bunny, and then he keeps looking until he’s found everyone who will be going to bed with him. He takes the items to his bed one by one and tosses them over the side. Once he is done, he stands next to the crib and lifts up his arms signalling that he is ready to get in.

And everyone, including Ben, must be put to sleep. The bunny and Raggedy Andy must be lying tummy down and their backs must be patted. “Night-night, Mr. Bunny. Night-night, Raggedy Andy. Night-night, Ben.” Then everyone goes to sleep. As in, once the Entourage is all settled, Steve just walks out of the room and goes about his business. Ben may chatter to himself for a few minutes, but in less than five minutes, it is quiet and everyone is asleep.

And every time we do this, I think of that show and the Buddhist person who had to take all these things with him to the “after-life.” When Ben wakes up in the morning, all of his friends are always as they were when everyone went to bed. But I wonder, does he dream about them at night when they’re with him? If so, what kind of fun do they have? What kind of things do they do? I wonder…

Here is Tana’s Law of being a SAHM (or stay-at-home-parent) and productivity: your attention span is equal to the attention span of your youngest child.

What does that have to do with productivity? Well, if your youngest child’s attention span is only thirty seconds, you are going to find yourself doing a lot of flitting around. In that mode, keeping the house clean and getting things done is a lot different than when it’s just you and you can focus on something for two hours without being interrupted or, quite frankly, distracting yourself.

Take laundry, for example. If it’s just you, you can write “laundry” on your to-do list and it will probably get done. But if you have children, you are constantly being distracted by what they are doing and it is going to be a much more challenging task. The FlyLady talks about doing something for just fifteen minutes. Well, I’m sorry, but fifteen minutes is an eternity for a toddler, and as the mother of a toddler, there is no way I could commit to doing just one thing for fifteen minutes.

So what do I do? I break the task down into chunks that match my toddler’s attention span. With the laundry, one task is to get the dirty clothes out of the laundry hamper in my room. That’s all. Just get them. The next task is to take them downstairs to the laundry room. Once that is accomplished, I can sort them (another 30 second task). At that point, the next step is to select a load and put it in the washer. If I’m really on a roll, I can actually start the washer. Wow! I am doing laundry!

This would be why my goal every day is to do one load of laundry. If I get three done (on rare occasion), that is great. But if I get just one done, I am very proud of myself.

Now for cleaning, I can either have my toddler help me (which doubles the time it takes to do anything) or I can try to do it quickly in small spurts. Take cleaning the bathroom. Step 1) Clear items off the sink. Step 2) Get cleaning rag and cleanser out. Step 3) Actually clean the sink – this step actually requires a bit of focus but can be done in about 30 seconds. Step 4) Wipe down toilet. Step 5) Put toilet cleaner in bowl, scrub toilet bowl and flush. Time to complete these four steps (from when step one is started to when step four is complete): can be as long as four hours. But who cares how long it took? The bathroom is clean!

To those who have never been a SAHM with small children, I probably sound like the epitome of incompetence. I mean, does it really take four hours to clean a bathroom? To them I say, check out my girlfriends houses (fellow SAHMS) and see how clean their homes are – then you will give me credit for getting the job done, regardless of the method actually used to complete it.

…but I don’t know who to give it to.

I’ve had the cold from hell all week. It started last Friday with a sore throat. Saturday night I had the worst chills I’ve ever had. Sunday I was a bit better.

Then Monday evening at 5:00 my left ear filled with fluid. It hurt some when I went to bed, but we didn’t have any decongestant so I just took one Aleve. At 1:35 a.m., however, the pain was so piercing I could no longer sleep. I got in the car, drove into town and bought some Sudafed at Walgreens. About an hour after I got back home, I was able to get back to sleep.

Tuesday, I was able to keep the misery at a “tolerable” level by taking Advil and Sudafed every six hours, but at 5:00, the dose I had taken two hours earlier was of no use. I called our family doctor and he said I should see someone that night.

My ear hurt so bad, and Ben kept screeching all day. I couldn’t tell if he was feeling bad so he was acting more “difficult” or if it was just that I didn’t feel good and had no tolerance for his “usual” behavior. That’s when I told Steve I needed to turn in my resignation but I didn’t know who to give it to. Ugh!

My Mary Kay weekly meeting was that evening, and I’d had a really good week in sales so I wanted to go to my meeting, not only to get out of the house and away from my screeching toddler but to enjoy the spotlight of recognition and get some motivation as well. So I went to my meeting even though it felt like someone was using a dagger to dig around in my ear. Steve’s words were, “Well, you’re an adult so I guess you can decide whether or not you want to go to your meeting feeling like you do.”

After the meeting I went to the clinic where I was the only patient since the after-work rush was already over. The doctor gave me these drops that were supposed to numb the pain and an antibiotic. He told me I could take two Aleve twice a day or four Advil three times a day – I needed to take that much for the anti-inflammatory part to take effect.

Well, the drops were a great idea, but it’s hard to get any moisture to run down into a tiny ear canal that is block in the other end so they just sat in my outer ear every time and never helped. I took the Aleve on Wednesday but didn’t seem to need it yesterday.

This has been the weirdest cold because I really haven’t been that congested. It’s just been my ear, which is still plugged with fluid even though it isn’t painful anymore, and other oddities like the chills Saturday night. I’ve been tired and really wanted to take a nap every afternoon, but of course I can’t since I’m in charge of watching Ben. So I’ve just sat on the couch and read books and knit most of the week because I didn’t have any more energy than that.

This morning I woke up all congested. Of course, Steve came down with my cold Wednesday and between the two of us, we finished off the decongestant last night. This was the first morning that I didn’t get up sometime during the 5:00 hour. I’ve been a faithful member of the 5:00 club for a month now, but this morning I figured I needed my sleep in order to get over this silly cold.

This afternoon I’m leaving to go on a Mary Kay retreat. I used to go on these back in Maryland, but I haven’t since I’ve lived in Nebraska. They’re really fun and I’m really looking forward to it. This is also the first time I will be leaving Ben overnight. Steve is adept at feeding him and getting him to bed every night, so I’m sure they’ll be fine. I have been looking forward to this retreat – I’m so mad that I have to be feeling this way when I finally get to go.

I’m going to the grocery store before I leave, and I shall buy some meds that will hopefully at least help me feel like a somewhat normal person. I’m so tired of being sick. I want to feel like myself again and have the energy to get things done. I have a headache, and I really don’t want to have to think about who I need to give my resignation to – there isn’t anyone who will take it anyway but I can’t seem to get over the urge that I need to turn one in.

Do moms ever get to call in sick?

I have taken up a new hobby. Don’t ask me where it came from. It involves sewing, which seems to be very difficult with a toddler around who finds sewing machine pedals and knobs very interesting. But I’ve taken up this new hobby none-the-less.

The hobby is quilting and my ultimate goal is to make a quilt for our bed. I have a duvet cover on a goose-down comforter that’s supposed to be big enough for a queen size bed, but isn’t really. If you want the comforter to come to the top of the mattress, there is nothing left to hang over the edge at the bottom. That bugs me.

I’ve considered making another cover for my goose-down comforter (which I love) and adding flaps which make it go the distance, if you know what I mean. But that just sounds like work and I haven’t found any fabric I really like.

At the same time, the thought of a really nice, comfy quilt appeals to me. Surely enough, I fought this urge for months. But finally, when we were in Florida, my mom and I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics where mom found a quilting book about strip-quilting. Basically, it’s quilting that is time efficient and looks really cool.

Sewing is not new to me, of course, but a rotary cutter is, and in order to quilt, you have to be very precise, which also is not something I’ve already demonstrated proficiency at. I mean, my seams on clothing are close, but it doesn’t matter if your 1/16″ off – the garment will fit just fine. In quilting, you have to make perfectly straight cuts (enter the rotary cutter) and then sew very accurate seams.

I decided that I would make a quilt for my Grandma for her 90th birthday which we will be celebrating in Oklahoma next month. She can’t see very well, so if it isn’t perfect, that’s okay. I thought I would make her a lap quilt so she can keep warm in her room at the nursing home. I wanted it to be comfy and something that wouldn’t be so pretty that she wouldn’t want to use it.

This is what I came up with:

To make that quilt, basically, I cut 27″ strips of fabric, sewed them togehter, and then cut each set into four block which I then assembled in to what you see above. The fabric was from Jo-Ann’s and I got it for $1.79 a yard so if I mess up too badly, I can always give it to Steve to use as a starter for his next campfire.

It was a good thing that the fabric was cheap, because I had to learn how to use a rotary cutter successfully. Let’s just say there was some fabric wasted when I did the cutting.

I plan to tie the quilt with yarn, which is how my mom says Grandma used to do her quilts. I’ll do one tie at the corner of each block, and no one will notice the three corners that were 1/4″ off when I sewed them together.

When I was shopping for that fabric for my Grandma, I wanted something that was calico and cheerful. I checked out the local fabric stores – Hancock and Jo-Ann’s – and then I also went to the local quilting stores where fabric is about $8 per yard instead of just $2 – $5.

Well, in all my shopping, I came across this beautiful coordinating fabric with roses and stripes. The only problem was that the main colors were salmon and sage green, which are very pretty but do not fit in any room in my house. I could not get my mind off this fabric, so once I had pieced together the main part of Grandma’s quilt, I went back and bought the other fabric. I sewed it up yesterday into the quilt top you see below:

This is one instance where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I loved the fabric – I really love the quilt. I couldn’t stop looking at it last night after I laid it out all assembled. Steve made fun of me that I was more excited about my pretty quilt than I was about Ben when he was born. But I just love this quilt.

On a side note, I must say the $8/yard fabric is much easier to work with than the $2/yard fabric. The cheap stuff doesn’t have any give, so if you’re cutting and seams aren’t quite exact, you’re going to know. The $8/yard fabric, on the other hand, is very easy to work with and can be eased to fit so the seams match without looking like it was eased. It was just great to work with and I absolutely love how the quilt came out.

They have an interesting discussion going on over at MDC in the SAHM forum about having a housekeeper to clean your house – how much they charge, what they do, etc. It seems that some SAHM’s are on top of the housework and some aren’t. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever done a study to see if keeping up with the housework after children correlates with keeping up with the housework before children…but I digress.

I had a housekeeper who cleaned my house every week when I was dating Steve. Then she wanted more money (fair enough – she was good) and we had just gotten married and dear Steve didn’t think we needed someone else to clean our house so I lost my housekeeper.

Now that I’m a SAHM, as I devote more and more time to my Mary Kay business, I often wonder if I should hire someone to clean. On one hand, in Mary Kay they teach us to delegate everything that doesn’t have to be done by us. If I was working full time plus doing Mary Kay fifteen hours or more a week, I would certainly either get a housekeeper or make Steve do the cleaning. But that isn’t my situation.

I’m a SAHM. I’m home all day, practically. If cleaning was something I absolutely could not do with Ben around, that would be one thing. But he loves to watch me clean. He is obsessed by it. Granted, it takes me twice as long when he is “helping” because he always stands right where I want to clean and then walks through my dirt a million times. But he loves to watch me clean, and I think that’s good for him.

I mean, I don’t want my children to grow up not knowing how to clean or, much worse, thinking cleaning is something we have other people do for us. Can you imagine what their dorm rooms would be like at college? You don’t need a maid when you’re in college, and I certainly won’t be paying for them to have one. So they need to know how to clean, and they need to know that it is something they can do themselves, not something that they need to find someone else to do.

And in addition to that, cleaning doesn’t take that long. I spend an hour on regular cleaning every week, at most, and then about the same doing extra stuff from cleaning out closets to dusting the ceiling fan blades and vacuuming under the beds. My house is pretty clean, and it’s not consuming a great deal of my time. No one’s complaining that it isn’t clean enough.

Furthermore, cleaning is something I can do that is a “quick win.” The results are always very positive – a clean house is much nicer than a dirty one. It doesn’t take long. It gets me up and moving around. It’s one of those great tasks that you can do, feel really good about yourself, and then have the confidence and energy to move on to more challening tasks that might tend to empty your bucket rather than fill it.

So why would I want to have someone else clean for me? What would I do with the time I would gain? I would have to have at least two hours of work for them to justify them coming all the way out to where we live, and I might have to pay them more than I did when I was in town. If I really got that busy with Mary Kay, I’m sure Steve wouldn’t object to my hiring someone. But cleaning is kind of like exercise – it makes everything else go better too.

And so I wonder if I will ever give it up. Do I love scrubbing toilets? Not really. Do I like having a clean house? Yes. Quite frankly, I think if I were to hire someone to help me, I’d hire them to do stuff at the computer long before I’d hire anyone to clean my house. I get tired of sitting in front of the computer, and I would happily delegate the Mary Kay busy-work to someone else if I could.