From Twitter:
Today’s accomplishments: laundry & groceries. I’m exhausted. And I didn’t even do them :S
We’re at the end of a week/month/extended period of hell/heck/purgatory. Concerned friends have asked me what’s been going on, assuming there’s been some kind of serious medical crisis.
Nope. It’s all the little stuff that adds up. I don’t want to be a whiner, because I know many people deal with far more serious issues than the ‘too many appointments/ too much too do’ state our family finds itself in. But, dealing with a million little things (and getting the kids ready, dressed, and out the door to deal with a little million things) takes its toll on everyone.
Our family enters a weird state of burn out, where everyone is overtired and no one is happy.
Just going to our regular round of appointments requires the scheduling and planning skills of an air traffic controller. Technology is a big help here. Hubby and I synch appointments to our phones (thank you Google Calendar), set alerts the day before so we can head out the door in the right direction the following morning. I schedule stuff, and notify Hubby via text where he’s supposed to take the kids. Usually it works.
Recently I had to take time off work to join Hubby and the kids on an appointment – one of those big sit down and talk meetings that cost a lot of money. So I scheduled the time off work, and as a school teacher left all kinds of things for my class to be doing, and confirmed with the supply teacher the date and time of coverage. I even left back up lesson plans. Hubby, the kids and I headed to the appointment early, because you may have noticed that I’m a Type-A person who does things like that, and we didn’t really know where it was. So we arrived an hour before the scheduled appointment (thank you Google Maps).
Hubby and I decided to sit back, sip our coffee and drive around the countryside looking at tractors and fields of grain. It was rare down time for us.
As we headed to our appointment, I received a panicked phone call from the receptionist – there’s been a family emergency, she was terribly sorry, but had to cancel our appointment a mere 15 minutes before our scheduled meeting.
Gah. How much planning was involved in just getting us to the appointment? We had made sure the kids had toys, snacks, and the electronic devices needed to sit through a boring meeting. Never mind me trying to organize the time off work.
Hubby and I looked at each other. The air traffic controller is left without a plane. I had two hours until the five year old came home from school. Free time. I glanced at my To Do list, “OK, let’s go get a new mattress for the kids’ bed. The old one is ruined.”
Done. Now on to the next task.
How does your family deal with too busy and too much too do?
Little Miss Adorable ready for action and planning her next outing.