overwhelmed

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This "Mom of 3" thing is totally kicking my butt.

I'll be honest.  IF we have more children, I need for it to be a while. I love babies, and being pregnant, but at this point that would feel like more of a burden.  I can't keep up with anything. Which is why my blogging has totally fallen by the wayside.  I'll admit it: I'm struggling.

I feel a little defective in the face of the "more than three" families I know, including my own family of origin. I feel like I should be able to handle this.  I mean, I was the over-achiever in high school and college.  I managed to keep on top of things then.  Why is it that I feel like I'm walking through a dense fog of chaos, avoiding my own children, while simultaneously accomplishing nothing except staring at a screen?  I wonder how women managed back in the day when we didn't have oodles of convenience products and appliances, and yet managed to find time to volunteer or create things.

In truth, it's not that I'm lying around the house in complete and utter inaction.  I feed my children, and we go shopping (spending money, now THAT is something I can do!) I do laundry when we run out of clean clothes. Some times we participate in group activities with other people in our homeschool group. I usually shower at some point in the day, but no guarantees that my hair will be brushed. We've been enjoying doing family activities like movie marathons and playing with our ever-expanding LEGO city (it will overwhelm the basement before long, I think).  I excel at enjoyable one-time distractions, like geocaching, thrift-store shopping, and trying to get involved in volunteer projects (and even going on a literal wild goose chase trying to track down a rare bird for Jude that I, the non-birder actually saw while he was working).

But as to my house and things that are not distractions? I can't seem to maintain any efforts to do something consistently, and certainly trying to change more than one thing at a time is simply going to lead to failure sooner.

So, for the past month we've been pretty much not-schooling.  Not even Un-schooling, because that would require some effort on the part of the parent(s) to find resources for the things a child wants to explore.  Hello PBSKids! Lots of movies. And me, trying to figure out what in the world I'm wasting my time on while my kids seems to be self entertaining.

Honestly, the list of ways I feel like I'm failing at parenting and in my life feels endless.

I've been talking with Jude on and off about this.  We're working at figuring out how to help me feel like I have a grip on things, but ultimately it takes me to be the one doing something different.  The past few days have been somewhat better. I'm not yelling at my kids as often.  I've started (and completed) a few projects that have been sitting around.  I've even done some token exercising, which is better than the NO exercising I've been doing. I hope that I will be able to maintain at least one of the improvements, and hope that one thing will lead to improvement in another, and another.  I have a long hill to climb (if only that counted as exercise!)