Time

This week has been one of “R&R”. Everyone in our family is sick with a horrible cold that goes through many different stages, and has us all wondering when it will all be over. The worst part of having a family cold is hearing McKenzie coughing at night. It breaks my heart, and yet there isn’t anything really that I can do to help. The other hard part is having a three-year-old whose only symptoms are a mild cough and a stuffy/runny nose. Other than that, she is my energizer bunny, and even this cold doesn’t seem to slow her down. And it goes on and on and on…

McKenzie is pulling herself up on everything and wanting to walk so badly. She doesn’t quite understand what happens when she lets go and falls, if it wasn’t so funny, it would be sad, she will learn soon enough—probably too soon. She is growing every day and I can’t believe how she is looking more and more like a toddler, and less and less like my baby girl she once was.

As I said before, Alexis has a ton of energy, and is jumping off of walls by the time daddy gets home. The weather isn’t nice enough to go outside yet, and our inside games are getting old for her. Games that were fun and wonderful at the beginning of winter have run their course and my mind can’t seem to come up with enough stuff to keep her occupied all the time. Our favorite ‘new’ game is for me to write letters A-Z and numbers 1-10 and any shape I can think of on construction paper. Then Alexis pulls out her markers and goes to town tracing and re-tracing all of her letters in every color. I love that this keeps her entertained, and she is learning so much. She loves to write her letters, even with out a guide, and does a really good job at writing her name.

Aaron’s school year is winding down. I am always amazed when I hear how long there is left. As I mentioned in a prior post, our local gas station has been keeping a count down letting everyone know how many weeks of school are left. I was absolutely flabbergasted to see that sign yesterday and be reminded that there are only 12 more weeks of school! Where has all the time gone? My one hope is that this summer will go just as fast. Aaron counts his days by what elementary school he is visiting, and loves going to Downey because it means it is Thursday and the work week is over. He just started introducing percussion to his 7th graders this week, and if you know Aaron, you know that this is a section that he loves probably more than he loves teaching music, which is hard to imagine.

And then that leaves me…I try to keep myself busy, but sometime it is inevitable and I find my self with more lazy days than productive days. I am much more motivated to get things done when Aaron is home. I read in my sister’s blog in one of the comments how hard the adjustment is from being a student to having a job, and I couldn’t agree more, even now, almost two years into Aaron’s ‘new’ job, and we are still trying to find a schedule and ‘make’ time for everything. The time I have Aaron at home is a lot less than the time we had together as students, and now with two additions to our family, it makes it that much harder to try to adjust and cope with the “lack of time”.

The solution seems so easy…what it all comes down to is adjusting to each and every adjustment life gives us. There have always been 24 hours in a day, we just need to use them differently now (Easier said than done).

So, how do you make your time stretch to include EVERYTHING? And, probably more importantly, how do you keep from "beating yourself up" when everything doesn’t get done?