schedules and neuroses

In the morning, I have such good intentions. Not every day, mind you. Some days I wake up and think, I'm not going to do a darn thing today. I am going to lay here (or lie here, if I'm feeling all grammatically correct of a morning), and I am not going to get up, even if Toby launches a rocketship made of common household materials, right off my roof. Those days, not such great intentions. And they never work out, anyway, because if Mohammed doesn't go to the mountain, the mountain comes and gets in Mohammed's bed with birthday cake remnants in their hair, complaining about Flash errors, or app update passwords, or reporting unauthorized defecation.



But other days, I think, I am going to put away all this laundry, doggone it. Then I'm going to mop the floors. Well, I'm going to Google the most effective way to mop floors, and then we'll see. And I'm going to knock out some homeschool, and figure out how to do a smokey eye, and a maiden braid, and then I'm going to return all these late library books and make something nutritious for dinner. And I'm going to be more intentional at parenting and have a good attitude.

One day out of a hundred, approximately, I nail it. I do all the things I wanted to do. But those are usually exhausting days, and I have to take a vacation day because I'm plumb wore out. I'm not anything like an overachiever, I do the things that are natural or easy to me and I have to force myself to do all the other stuff.

Unrelated: Brynn washes
van with cup

I'm always amazed by people who make lists and do things, lots of things. Do they enjoy it? Do they force themselves to move from one activity to the next? I break out in hives every time I try to make a schedule. I can handle it, having a loose routine each day, unless I think too far in advance, like, I am going to do this thing at this time, every day for the foreseeable future, which means it could be infinite. I could be feeding people animal crackers at 11 am forever. Oh my gosh, I'm going to do this forever and my life will never have any variety at all and I'm stuck, I'm so stuck. What if I want to go on a trip? And so on. I never said it was rational.

The trick is to trick myself into thinking it's not a routine. I just happen to do the same things at approximately the same time, every day. I could quit any time I wanted. Right? Right, guys?