Fitting it all in to the hours I’ve got
For the last year or more I have been calling myself a full-time working mother. That is inaccurate. I did the math yesterday. I average 20-30 hours per week of business tasks. Some weeks have 40+ business hours, but other weeks only have 10 or so. 30 hour of work per week counts as part-time, not full time. I have a newfound respect and awe for families where both parents work full time. Our house has been crazy this past week because no one is paying attention to the little things that make the family run smoothly. We keep running out of clean dishes and clean clothes. We keep tripping over clutter. We keep walking past that dried-up dollop of mint-n-chip ice cream on the kitchen counter. (How long has it been since we had mint-n-chip ice cream? One week? Two weeks? Has no one washed the counter thoroughly in that long? eeep.)
I can work for 30 hours per week without hideously impacting our family schedule. It means I do business while the kids are out of the house and focus on household when they’re home. That works well. The minute I go over that for any extended period of time, things start to get messy. This is good to know. We can not have a long term pattern that requires me to work more than 30 hours per week. Short-term high-working-hour patterns, like for book shipping, or this XDM scramble, or a convention are acceptable so long as they are sufficiently spaced out by periods of normal.
I’ve worked for 8 hours so far today. I may be done for the day, or I may put in some more time after the kids are abed. In some ways having them back in school has been easier. I had 6 quiet hours today. Other things have been harder. I had a hard time keeping my cool this morning while helping the kids get ready for school. I wanted to rush everybody off to school so that I could get to work. Only that doesn’t work well. In fact at one point Link looked at me and said “I just want you to be happy mom.” Gleek and Patch both chimed in with agreement. They can tell I am stressed and they want their calmer mom back. I hugged them and apologized. Just one more week and the craziness should be largely over. I could see the end of XDM layout for the first time today. Three chapters have been declared “done” which means that they’re ready for proofreading. I made a chart so that I can track what is left to do on each chapter. It may be silly, but having boxes to fill when each task is finished, make the job seem possible. It definitely makes it easier for me to see what I should work on next. I think I’ve broken out of the overwhelmed middle of the project and now I’m on the home stretch.