When there aren’t enough hours in the day…
November 1st, 2006 2:46:51 pm pst by Sterling CamdenSorry for the dearth of posts lately, other than my daily link blog. Trying to keep up with a steady stream of work and at the same time managing many of the duties that my wife is unable to perform since her injury (not to mention taking her to doctor’s appointments and therapy for said injury) I haven’t had two extra seconds to obsess on my Technorati rank or count the pennies in my Adsense account, let alone blog.
My day starts at 4:45 AM when I get up to feed Halley and take her for our run/walk/stop/sniff/repeat . We have to start that early if this activity is to occur at all, as you will see from what follows.
5:50 AM: Get home, take a shower. Make my son’s lunch and snack for school before he’s awake to contest its contents: yogurt, carrots, crackers, and a brownie. Put away last night’s dishes, load any late dirty ones. Take recycles and garbage out. Make a cup of tea for myself. Breathe.
6:30 AM Wake my son, make him breakfast — usually a toasted English muffin with melted butter. Funny, my English friend Jim says he never saw these in England. Like French fries, I suppose.
6:45 AM Get my son’s clothes and toiletries in order. Find his jacket and shoes; untwist the former and unknot the latter. Start my breakfast on simmer (yes, it takes a lot of time to cook my breakfast, but it’s the only decent meal I get most days). Review any requirements for school such as forms to fill out or homework to review.
7:15 AM Take my son out to meet his school bus. Exhale.
7:20 AM Knock on my daughter’s door to wake her. It doesn’t help that each child’s school has a different bus schedule. Make my daughter’s breakfast — usually French toast and hot cocoa. Add a few more ingredients to my breakfast in between. Pack my daughter’s lunch: a turkey and lettuce sandwich on Jewish rye (crust must be excised), applesauce, crackers, and orange juice. Review her school requirements, maybe quiz her on spelling words.
Somewhere about now my wife hobbles out with her walker. Make her coffee and toast with melted butter, cinnamon, and Stevia.
8:00 AM Start the shower for my daughter so she doesn’t burn herself. Finish making the seventh meal I have prepared this morning (my breakfast) and start to eat it while reading Ulysses (disclaimer: Amazon associate). Get interrupted several times to take care of some unforeseen emergency or brush my daughter’s hair before I finally finish the last few cold bites. That’s on a good day. If I get interrupted too many times, I’ll have to leave half of it until later. I can’t decide which is worse: breakfast interrupted, or James Joyce interrupted.
8:35 AM My daughter and I retrieve our retriever Halley to walk with us to the bus stop. My daughter gets on the bus; the bus driver throws a treat to Halley. We laugh that Halley thinks that the bus is just a big, yellow treat dispenser. I run back with Halley to her dog run. Go back inside. Breathe.
9:00 AM Prepare the shower for my wife. This involves positioning various stools, towels, and chairs so that she can get herself in and out safely. Setup the laptop on the bed so she can go online. Retrieve various other things that she might need during the day. Exhale.
9:30 AM Read e-mail and feeds. Depending on how long that takes, I might actually start working anywhere from 10:00 AM to noon.
Most afternoons I have to take my wife to a doctor’s appointment or physical therapy, or one of the children to some afterschool event or activity. Yesterday evening was consumed with the annual mockery of the ancient celebration of Samhain, in which I escorted the children around to various doorways so they could extort unbelievably unhealthy edibles (questionably so) by means of an unspecified threat of mischief.
I’m getting pretty tired of being Daddy and Mommy. Maddy. Dommy. Dummy. It will be several weeks yet before my wife can rest weight on her right leg, though, so I’d better get used to it.
Then this morning I slept through my alarm clock. Somehow I managed to get both kids fed and on their respective busses along with their lunches, but the rest of the usual schedule suffered high casualties.
So what do I do, seated amidst the wreckage of things left undone?
Blog it, that’s what.
Posted in Get a Grip | 5 Comments » RSS 2.0
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Ah, welcome to the joys of being a mother, which is probably why I decided not to have kids
Seriously, I hope your wife is mending well. That was a heck of an injury, and sounds like she’s be a time mending. To bad you don’t live in St. Louis, or I’d bring you all over a nice pot of homemade chicken soup and dumplings.
PS Ulysses? Prepare to forgo punctuation for days.
Thanks Shelley, we’d take you up on that soup — especially now that the rains have started. The doctors are expecting a full recovery by Spring. She’ll be able to put some weight on it in a few weeks, but she’ll need a walker, crutches, or a cane for a while. It was quite an injury. I think it was made worse by her attempts to correct on the way down. She should have been drunk; she would have escaped unharmed. Thanks for the wellwishes.
Yes Ulysses lack of punctuation and strungtogetherwords and begob the opaque Irish idioms
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