I’ve been dragging all week long. Usually I spend the morning knocking down multiple small items on my To Do list, or knocking down one big item. By afternoon I’m ready to slow down. This week the mornings have been slow and the afternoons have been close to a dead stop. Yesterday morning I admitted defeat and went back to bed as soon as I got the kids off to school. I slept for nearly two hours. Then I got up and ate breakfast. Yesterday was still pretty slow, but this morning I’m feeling closer to normal. I think I may have been fighting an illness. Or maybe I was still recovering from not getting to sleep in over the weekend. Or maybe sleep and food are good for me. Who knew?
The one thing I did get done yesterday was to put most of the labels on the last 800 post cards. Patch and I sat at the table with my little video player. We watched Mythbusters while applying labels and stamps. Patch was very pleased to be able to help. He was even more pleased to be earning a little money for his work. He’s saving up for an Indian Jones lego set like Link has. It was fun to sit at the table with him. We occasionally commented to each other about the show. Other times Patch would tell me about things that happened at school. Patch has a strong need to verbalize his experiences. I need to be making more time to listen to him because it is always interesting to hear the connections he makes.
The only other thing I managed to accomplish yesterday was laundry. Laundry is something of a nemesis lately. It seems like every time I turn around the baskets of clean laundry are empty and the dirty laundry hampers are full. Lately the clothes cycle from clean basket to dirty hamper without ever seeing the inside of a drawer or closet. This has the effect of making us all feel jumbled because we all have to rummage through piles to find clothes to wear. Obviously the system needs an overhaul of some kind, but I can see what to change yet.
Today I am shipping out packages, finishing laundry, mailing post cards, and making sure I eat on schedule. Tomorrow I am sleeping late because it is Saturday and I can.
Postcard
Got my postcard today, the first of my holiday cards this year!
Doing my own laundry was one of the few household chores — the only one I can remember, really — assigned to me as a child. I think I began to wash my own clothes towards the end of elementary school.
I was just about to comment but got beat to it … Kiki and Link are both well past the age of doing their own laundry, all or in part.
If Kiki’s like my stepsister, it took only one instance of having to dig through the huge pile of dirties in search of something clean enough for school to motivate her to do it herself before it became a crisis 🙂
Or maybe chores by the week: one week is child A’s turn to help sort while child B folds … next week B sorts while C folds … and so on. Our family did chores by the week because we’d always forget (pretend to, or sometimes for real) if it was our *day* to be in charge of a particular chore, but you’d always remember if it was your WEEK and if not, the siblings sure remembered. Also, week-long chore assignments meant that it was more “fair” in terms of the work load evening out over the week with some light days plus some heavy days.
Laundry is a valuable life skill.
Then again, my mother-in-law’s failure to teach her son how to do laundry helped cement our relationship. The day before he met me, he turned all of his clothes pink … he literally had never been told about things like dividing the colors from whites, when to use hot vs cold, and so on. So our second date was me teaching him how to do his laundry and we had a long, very serious discussion about Us and Our Relationship while the machines churned away.
Re: Postcard
Yay! We win!
The kids do help, but I have to remind them…and then I forget to remind them.
We have a system of scaled laundry assistance.
At 4 they start putting their folded clothes into the drawers.
At 8 they start doing their own folding and putting away.
At 12 they start doing their own washing, folding, and putting away.
This means that Kiki does her own laundry. Except that it frequently sits in clean or dirty piles in the same physical space as the other laundry. Link does his own folding, but usually he skips folding and just crams things into drawers. I keep feeling like I should argue about that, but it is a battle I keep deciding not to fight right now. Gleek and Patch both are very good about putting their clothes away, but I have to get around to folding them first, which…takes a long time.
The linens and the grown up clothes are all mine to do and they never get done except when they’ve piled up.