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New baby's resolution four: Don't get bogged down in scheduling specific tasks.

Part of a series that starts here.  We're coming up with resolutions -- not in honor of the new year, but instead of a new baby's arrival and consequent disruption of all the routines that had been serving us well.

Resolution zero:  to acknowledge our family's most important priorities and give each their due

Resolution one:  of these, designate four as "all-the-time" intentions:

• Serve God
• Show love, interest, and delight in one another
• Model reason, generosity, and kindness to resolve conflict
• Teach diligence

Resolution two:  Simplify the list of things we must "make time for."  I got it down to this:

• Rest
• Self-care
• Meals
• Learning time (since we're homeschoolers)
• Activities
• Work (a.k.a., the to-do list)

Resolution three:  to accept the limits on my time, spending it on a few choice tasks and letting go of the rest of the to-do list

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In the last post  I calculated that, on a typical weekday, I have somewhere between 4 and 5 hours to accomplish tasks of the sort that I might put on a to-do list. 

I don't say, "I have 4-5 hours to knock all the items off my to-do list."  That's because Resolution Three requires me to accept that I will never get them all. 

(I'm thinking that the "to-do" list needs a different name.  "Could-do" list?  No, still implies possibility of completion.  "Might-do" list?  "Task menu?"  Will have to think more.)

 This kind of work includes

• work for the children's schooling including long-term planning, yearly curriculum selection and purchasing, weekly lesson preparation, evaluation and record-keeping
• work for the familyincluding laundry and clothes-buying; dishes; tidying; meal planning and grocery shopping; cooking dinner; and maintaining the family appointment calendar
• work for others including volunteer commitments, helping friends, and any paid work;
• creative work including hobbies, blogging, self-improvement, and other satisfying personal projects

When I made schedules in the past, I thought I had to "do everything" at least once in a while.  That meant that I had to find a time for each task on my list.  If there wasn't enough time to do each thing as often as I needed, I would just have to do everything less frequently:  instead of mopping every week, I'll mop every two weeks.

I did all this by slotting many tasks into specific times of the day or week or month.  For example, Thursday mornings between the end of breakfast and the start of co-schooling was Time To Put Away All The Accumulated Clean Laundry.   Time For Weekly Lesson Planning was Wednesday evening while the children were at church for catechism class.  Set Up All The Week's School Materials Time was Sunday night right before bed.  Blogging Time?  Mornings, before kids get up.

But I didn't always do what I said I was going to do, either because another task felt more urgent or because I thought of some other task I preferred. 

(Often, blogging.)

And then I would berate myself for departing from the schedule, particularly later when I couldn't find any matching socks or graph paper.   I would do this even if it turned out to have been a good trade-off.  There wasn't any room for flexibility or forgiveness. 

I'm just not a flexible sort of person; I'll probably always feel kind of bad about changing my plans.  I therefore conclude that I ought to make less specific plans.  If I don't get around to a particular task now, because it's not so urgent, well -- sooner or later it will become urgent and command my attention.

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But I don't want to get carried away doing only housework, or only school planning -- the two categories that often masquerade as SUPER URGENT MUST DO for days at a time.  I need to use some of my time for creative outlets as well, so I can stay recharged and sharp.  Also, I owe at least a little bit of work to other people.

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Resolution Four is about the moment of choosing which tasks will and won't happen in the four hours and change that I have available for it every day. 

I resolve to regularly choose tasks from the categories of creative work, work for the family, work for others, and work for the kids' school. 

I'm not promising equal time for each category and I'm not promising to hit every category every day.  But I am resolving to hit them all in their turn, each day choosing what makes the most sense for that day, and -- what's harder -- letting go of what doesn't.

 

New baby's resolution three: Know how much time I have in the day.

Continuing a series that starts here.

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I figured out in the last post that there are about six basic ways I can slice up the hours in my day.

1. Rest and sleep
2. Meals
3. Self-care
4. Learning time
5. Activities
6. Work

"Work" encompasses a lot of different things, but I found one easy way to figure out if a thing is "work:" might I put it on a to-do list and then procrastinate it, possibly for days, while feeling guilty about not getting around to it? If so, it is work.

I do not tend to do this with, say, taking a shower or eating lunch or going to the gym. That is how I know that showering is not work, but self-care; and lunch is not work, but a meal; and going to the gym is not work, but an activity.

I do tend to do this with housework or school planning or home improvement projects or even many hobbies that I enjoy, such as writing blog posts. So they all count as work of one kind or another.

I suppose instead of "work" I could call that category "My To-Do List." That isn't a bad idea. I will consider that.

Anyway, it's all the stuff in "work" that tends to dog me.

I. Cannot. Do. It. All.

I need to let some of it go. But how much to let go? Do I even know how much time I have to do these things?

 Let's figure it out, roughly.

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 "Roughly" is the best I can do right now. I have a 6-week-old baby and my efficiency is consequently unusually low, plus it swings widely from day to day depending on his nursing pattern. ( I am taking advantage of the resulting low postpartum schooling and housekeeping standards to write these blog posts while the kids play poker downstairs.)

If I was in a more stable pattern, I might try another time study like the one I did a few years ago, only with the time categories chopped up a little differently. That was a lot of fun, and I recommend the exercise to anyone who is curious about how they spend their time. But that measure takes a week, and I need something a little more quick and dirty -- just an estimate.

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 We start with 24 hours in the day. I estimate generously that I should sleep for about eight hours -- about 10:30 pm to 6:30 am. That leaves sixteen hours.

Meals -- this does not include real cooking, just serving and eating and putting away -- are variable. Breakfast is fairly self-serve and not messy, so let's say I spend half an hour on that (including unloading the dishwasher from the night before). I take longer, maybe an hour, for lunch and post-lunch cleanup -- that's because I have helpers. The same for dinner. Then we have two snacks in our day that probably add up to a half hour. That's about three hours in a typical day at home. Remaining balance: Thirteen hours.

A day's bathing, dressing, grooming, and getting ready for bed -- let's say 45 minutes. I think that's pretty generous. Remaining balance: Twelve and a quarter hours.

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Let's pause here to notice that activities, learning, and work -- plus any extra rest I might need -- have to fit into twelve and a quarter hours. From day to day, the allocation of that time among those three categories probably fluctuates quite a bit. But I am looking for a reasonable, realistic estimate of how much time I have for the to-do list. So let's truck on with estimates of time spent on activities and learning.

I allot about five hours a day (9:30 to noon, and 2 to 4:30) that at least one of my children is doing schoolwork, and I really should be engaged with them for most of that time. So let's say that I am busy that whole five hours with "learning time." Remaining balance: seven and a quarter hours.

That time gets divided up between work and activities (unless it's used for extra rest). Sometimes there isn't any special activity at all, of course, leaving the whole 7.25 hours free.

(Did I say "free?" Ha. It is telling that I am now beginning to think of the "knock-things-off-my-to-do list time" as "free time." Can we say, "workaholic?" Can we say, "defines self-worth in terms of accomplishments?")

Anyway, typical evening activities are swimming lessons at the Y, or religious education classes at church. The swimming lessons take us about two and a half hours when you count travel time, changing, and showering. Religious ed is two and a quarter. So let's estimate generously and say that two and a half hours go to activities, when there are any.

Remaining balance that I can count on having for "work" on this typical, imaginary day:

4 and three-quarters hours.

Well, now. That isn't so bad. It is less than I would like, and it's true that it needs to be broken up throughout the day -- a half hour here, an hour forty-five there -- but it isn't like there is no time at all. And when there isn't a scheduled activity, or if I get out of it for some reason (say if Mark volunteers to take the kids to RE) -- there's bonus time. And any time I don't spend that time working, it could be used for resting.

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That calculation being finished, we come to the resolution part of the post: to accept that those 285 minutes in each day are what I can expect to use for work, give or take a little.

 So here is resolution three, in full. I resolve

• to stop pretending I can somehow stretch those 285 minutes out;
• to value them, and try not to waste them;
• to quit berating myself for not doing more than I could reasonably have done in those minutes;
• to decide what tasks to use them for, and then to delegate the rest or let them go.

Easier said than done, of course, but by counting them up (roughly) I am at least a bit closer to having my eyes open.

 

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New baby's resolution two: Simplifying the list of things that there are "times" for.

Part of a series that starts here.

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Last time I wrote about my post-baby resolutions, I said that I'd identified some intentions that wouldn't become part of a "schedule," but would rather be things I would try to keep in mind all the time.

Essential ingredients for every time-block.

These were:

• Serving God in everything
• Showing each other LOVE, INTEREST, & DELIGHT in one another
• Anticipating/resolving conflict by modeling KINDNESS, GENEROSITY, & REASON
• Helping each other work by teaching DILIGENCE

You may have noticed that these don't correspond quite exactly to any of the "essentials" that I identified in my first post. They are distilled from some of those "essentials" in order to get their total number down.

One thing is for certain, we'll never get anything done if we are running in too many directions at once.

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So of those essentials, what remains?

• Connecting with God.
• Resting.
• Showing love to, and taking delight in, each other.
• Connecting with people outside our family.
• Resolving conflict and encouraging generosity, particularly among the children.
• Helping each other work, and learn to work, with diligence.
• Caring for our bodies (and that extension of our bodies, our clothing and appearance).
• Meals.
• Physical activity.
• Order in our environment.
• Learning.
• Creative work.
• Work that serves others.

And can these things that remain -- the things that "there are times for" -- be simplified even further?

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Our days and weeks must have "times" for

• rest and sleep
• meals (planning, shopping, preparing, eating, cleaning up)
• health (physical activity, hygiene, medical care)
• clothing care and dressing ourselves and grooming (purchasing, laundry, haircuts, etc.)
• maintaining an orderly environment

• intellectual development (teaching, school planning, curriculum, chosen hobbies and such)
• connecting with the outside world (volunteer work, seeing friends, paid work)

But that's a lot of different stuff.

Far too overwhelming to make anything even approximating a daily or weekly routine.

And some of the categories are nebulous.

"Physical Activity, Hygiene, Medical Care" only go together in an abstract way as "healthy" things to do. They are not anything like one another in a practical sense. They're not done at the same frequencies or at the same times of day or in the same places. They can't be substituted for one another: one hour in the bathtub, one three-mile walk, and one doctor's appointment don't have the same effect on my overall health.

Better to re-formulate the categories and condense them, without micromanaging the details. Mother Teresa's rule for her sisters famously included time blocks that were simply labeled things like "Work for the poor." It wasn't subdivided into individual tasks. I need the same generality categories, because in this season of life, I need to stay flexible. At a particular time in the afternoon, I may need to spend some time homemaking, but I don't want to say "laundry at this time, bed-making at this other time, return phone calls from then until the next time." I need the flexibility to do whatever household task is most important and then let the rest of the to-do list go when I have to move on to some other activity.

So what I came up with was this list:

Things we make "times" for

• Rest
• Taking care of body and clothing
• Meals
• Learning time
• Work
• "Activities"

Much simpler, isn't it?

 

I got away with so few categories by making several of them broader. For example, "rest" includes naps, quiet recreation (such as reading for pleasure or surfing the web in bed), and sleep. By thinking about clothing as an extension of the body, I was able to collapse the whole of the processes of getting up in the morning and getting ready for bed, encompassing dressing, bathing, dealing with hair, and even putting clothes away. "Meals" includes the necessary clean-up afterwards.

 

"Work" encompasses several kinds of work, some enjoyable, some not my favorite. I guess now that I look at it, "work" is anything that I tend to procrastinate. It includes work for the family (a.k.a. homemaking), work for the kids' schooling, creative work (aka hobbies), paid work, and service. This category probably needs to be subdivided some, however, so that none of the kinds of work gets short changed; but maybe on a weekly rotation.

 

"Learning time" is not called "school" because I need to separate it from the "school work" I have to do every day, week, and year: curriculum purchasing, planning, grading, and record keeping, not to mention maintaining our materials and space. Rather, "learning time" needs its own turn at the top of my priorities. By "learning time" I mean the time that the kids spend directly engaging with their schoolwork and that I spend teaching them or keeping them on task. I am always tempted to wander off and get something else done the instant that everyone appears to be working independently; but what they really need (especially the younger ones) is for me to stay focused and present to them for a good-sized block of time.

 

"Activities" sounds pretty nebulous, but in our family it is immediately obvious what this word means. It's the stuff we do after dinner and on the weekends. Family gym night; swimming lessons; Wednesday night religious education; going to Mass on Sundays and holy days; Scouts and AHG; shows at the Children's Theatre; the occasional outing for bowling or a movie; potluck and board game night with friends. Nearly all of it optional, and none of it has to be "made up" if it's missed for reason of illness or crisis.

 

Now I have gone and expanded them, but remember that it all collapses into just six categories.

 

Rest, meals, learning, work, self-care, activities. To everything there is a time. And each of these to be met, all the time: in a spirit of service, loving one another, peacefully, diligently.

 

More details in the next resolution.

 

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New baby's resolutions: Resolution zero.

New Year's resolutions are so passé.

Especially in February, she said. But I digress.

If you have messed up your New Year's resolutions already, you could wait till Lent starts, of course. Lots of people try new things then. I do think Lent can be a good time to try new self-disciplines, so to speak, though unfortunately many of us attempt to turn it into a diet plan. That can be counter-productive, when you consider the reason for the season.

I am now thinking that a really great time for a resolution -- a shaking up of the old routines and a turning over of a new leaf -- is several weeks after the birth of a new baby.

Because you know what?

There's no going back to the way things were before.

I might as well formalize it.

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Even before we decided to invite a new little one into our lives, I knew I didn't really have room for one more along with everything else I do. I knew, I really did, that something was going to have to give.

That didn't stop me from trying to hang onto everything, even as I struggled to stay awake through the first trimester and to keep up with everyone during the second and the third. It didn't stop me from trying to keep up what I had been doing and hang on to all my commitments, and that is probably good because I really have to try and FAIL before I am okay with giving up.

Early on, I figured out that I wasn't going to be able to keep up with school by advance-planning everything on the weekends (including copying and printing, getting books to and from the library, writing new worksheets, composing emails with instructions to my "independent" students, and writing answer keys) and then sticking to my preplanned work on weekdays, keeping careful records of what everyone accomplished each day.

Up till this last year, that has worked pretty well. It isn't going to work anymore. I have now hit the point where if everything were going to be preplanned and prepared by me to my own exacting standards, I would have to spend my Entire Weekend on that work. And this is not good for my family, even if -- maybe BECAUSE -- I kind of enjoy holing up in a locked room with a computer and a curriculum catalog and no human interaction for 12 hours at a time.

Something has to give.

And that is just one area of my life where I was overindulging in productivity. We haven't even talked about things like housekeeping, or dinner, or the few volunteer commitments that one or the other of us has made.

It's the same way there. Something has to give.

I warned my partner in co-schooling, H., before I warned anyone else, not long after I found out I was pregnant, that my standards were about to slip, and I didn't think it would improve matters by trying to plan out exactly how they would slip, so I was just going to LET them slip and see what happened.

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H. didn't really have a chance to give me much feedback before she found out she was pregnant too, and then that she was going to have twins, so, you know, any plans we had for the year were going to go out the window anyway and be replaced by ... Something.

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So what are the new baby's resolutions? I think I am going to spread this post out over several days because I still have to process some of them, and I have been having a damnably hard time blogging for the last few months.

Which might have something to do with my foggy brain. Though the causality could really be going either way.

But the first resolution... No, wait. The zeroth resolution, really, since it has to underlie all the others... Is to recognize that I have priorities. Priorities with names. Values.

It's like this. We need these things in our lives (no particular order here):

• Connecting with God.
• Resting.
• Showing love to, and taking delight in, each other.
• Connecting with people outside our family.
• Resolving conflict and encouraging generosity, particularly among the children.
• Helping each other work, and learn to work, with diligence.
• Caring for our bodies (and that extension of our bodies, our clothing).
• Meals.
• Physical activity.
• Order in our environment.
• Learning.
• Creative work.
• Work that serves others.

Resolution zero is to recognize and honor these priorities so that I can somehow use my time (and help the rest of the family use their time) in a way that gives each of these their due.

 

+ + +

 

So much for new directions. I only know one way to start anything, and that is by making a list. I have written and rewritten and re-rewritten the list over and over for a week, moving the bits around, and yet nothing has changed yet.

 

Sooner or later I will have to put down the pen and get out of my chair.

 

But not yet.

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Collision of housekeeping standards, plus update.

Mark's parents are taking care of our boys at our house while he and I keep vigil at the hospital with our post-appendix-rupture daughter.

This is wonderful and something we are grateful for. This also leads to exchanges like the following:

MARK'S MOM: Erin, what do you use to wipe up the bathroom floor?

ME: What do you mean?

MARK'S MOM: I just want to wipe up the floor.

ME (alarmed): Why? Did someone spill something?

MARK'S MOM: No...

(Pause while we stare at each other uncomprehendingly for a moment)

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The 7-year-old is doing well this morning. We hit a lot of milestones yesterday, and the whole day felt wonderfully positive until after dinner (she ate dinner! That she asked for and selected herself!).

Later that evening she had a routine nursing-care event that turned out to be much more unpleasant for her than either of us or any of the nurses on duty expected or had warned her about, and she accused us of lying about it, became recalcitrant, and refused to take her pain meds for the rest of the night.

But this morning she appeared to understand that in order to go home, she has to drink the amount of fluids we tell her to drink (even if she does not feel like drinking any of the things we offer and cannot think of something else to ask for) and she has to eat meals (even if she is not hungry and none of the choices sound appealing) and she has to go to the bathroom (even if she is tired) and she has to take the pills we tell her to take (even if she thinks she is better without them).

Mark's mom has come in to visit this morning to help her feel more willing to do all those things. There is no substitute for Grandma there, let me tell you.

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The wheel of the generations.

Last weekend we went to stay with another family we have known since I was in graduate school. On Saturday afternoon I found myself at the elementary-school playground, watching my kids run around on the grass. The youngest one was literally running around -- in circles -- and the older ones were playing ultimate frisbee with the other kids and dads.

Me? I was too tired to run or kick a ball or throw a frisbee or do anything but gestate. In mid-to-late pregnancy, everything is growing so fast that it sucks up all the available energy. And even if the rational mind knows why this is, and understands the deep reasonableness of to sitting and take it easy for a few minutes or an hour between doings, sometimes it weighs heavily.

Oof, I am a good-fer-nuthin' sluggish loser. It affords a marvelous opportunity to feel slightly sorry for oneself.

Out on the grassy field, my seven-year-old daughter, the only girl on the field, sprinted after the boys, leaped for a catch and missed, skidded to a stop and ran back the other way. She is a confident girl-child, strong and bright, more than a little ornery these days.

I am ornery too, swelling and tired. I have written before: I wake up many mornings, astonished to find myself here, having chosen to throw all my best efforts into raising and educating five children. Plenty of other worthy people save some of their best efforts to build other things. Often very worthwhile things, and indeed things that serve families in many different ways.

"...the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work.... In fact, the family is ... a community made possible by work...

"...Man must work out of regard for others, especially his own family, but also for the society he belongs to, the country of which he is a child, and the whole human family of which he is a member, since he is the heir to the work of generations and at the same time a sharer in building the future of those who will come after him in the succession of history, All this constitutes the moral obligation of work." -- Laborem exercens 16

(I am trying to get across, in case you can't tell because pregnancy has stunted my communication skills, a notion of "there are a lot of different ways to lead a life of good service to the human community that helps children and families to flourish." It is meant to be an inclusive sort of expression. I am trying to insulate myself from accusations of taking a side in the mommy wars here.)

Even so, I am haunted by a rat-racey sort of element. All that time, effort, and emotion I invested becoming an educated person, now poured into the education of more little persons, some of whom in turn might simply pour all their effort into the education of their own young. Turning, turning, turning through the years. Get ready, get ready, get ready for a real life, when you will grow up to do Important Things and be respected. And then: when readiness is achieved, toss it all lightly aside in favor of a more centered life... one spent helping little ones get ready, get ready, get ready.

A treadmill wheel, so to speak.

I think the vague disquiet comes from having grown up with the notion that the most important thing for a bright girl to do is to grow up and achieve. Other than making plenty of money and living in interesting places, the details were often missing. Perhaps it all only meant "achieve more than those other people do." Instead I am achieving something that anyone with working reproductive organs and enough time on her hands can do, and do just as well as I can.

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"Poor kid," I say to my husband later about my youngest, as I decompress in a recliner, "by the time i have this baby he's not going to be able to remember a time before I was practically an invalid."

"'Poor kid' indeed," says my husband, "he is going to have a new sibling to play with."

"Yes, and that will be worth it," I say. I suppose it is a different sort of treadmill, one a little closer to nature. Raise kids to raise kids to raise kids, on and on, one generation after another.

On this treadmill, the primary directive is to keep children, then adults, whole: by keeping families whole, by passing on the habit of living examined lives dedicated to forming the next generation. These families are "made possible by work," and so it's also to serve that prime directive that we pass on diligence, care, a knowledge base, and skills.

It's so easy to mistake the means for the end, isn't it?

You look outside and work on the world outside the circle of the family, always in order to strengthen and support and form your family, so that your children grow up strong and can do the same. But the circles are interconnected and the work we do also (if it is good work) serves other families through the medium of society and an economy. It all hangs together, and the whole thing will be stronger the more of us who acknowledge that the purpose of all that work is to prepare the next generation and also a place for it to thrive -- and each individual has a place in that scheme whether he or she passes on genes or not, and whether he or she takes a place willingly or not.

And that? That is even before you bring eternity into the mix.

Every act, thought, and word has unimaginable consequences: a truth that is accessible to all honest philosophy.

 

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It's been a while since I had a homemaking post: Laundry.

Dorian put up a lazy-laundry-system post in her 7 Quick Takes on Friday, managing (as you can see by the ellipses in the excerpt I pulled below) to stretch it out into several separate takes, since she is a lazy cheater and we can all see through her façade "organized, brilliant web whiz" façade.

So, I read Harvard Homemaker’s post about laundry and was pleasantly surprised to learn that not only do I already understand laundry, but I also do something that was not on the list. I thought “hey, I should write about that. Need something to blog about.”

Then I thought “well, hey, what should I call this tip. It could be ‘Lazy Mom’s Guide to Laundry with Kids.’”

...Anyway: here’s my exciting tip that has no picture because my laundry room is cramped and non-photogenic.

I have a set of shelves in the laundry room and a basket for each family member, along with one for linens. I let the kids make labels for their baskets to add an element of “fun” that lasted for 47 seconds. (Remember, kids: Mom believes that work IS fun!)

When I take a load of laundry out of the dryer, I put each item into the appropriate person’s basket. I do not fold the items.

Once a day, each child is supposed to put away his/her clothes from said basket and return the empty basket to the shelf.

...“How do I handle folding the kids’ clothes?”

Gentle Reader: I do not care.

Since I went to the trouble of describing my similar system in her comments, and I am not posting much, I decided to make it into a blog post.  Whee!

I have a similar system, only I do it weekly instead of daily.

We wash and dry baskets as they fill up, one or two a day, so they don’t get too stinky.  and we let the clean unsorted laundry pile up in baskets in the laundry room, which is also the kids’ bathroom.

Here's a picture of my unsorted clean laundry, because I'm unafraid to show you the gritty reality of life.  You don't get to see the bathroom part, because my nine-year-old ran in to use it while I was framing the photo.

Then on Wednesday afternoons while the 3yo is having a bath and I need to be in there supervising anyway, I sort all the laundry into individual baskets.

Not individual people's baskets, but individual closets'  baskets.  

My two oldest boys share a room, and I don't wish to devote brain cells to remembering which one of them has black socks and which one of them has white socks, or which one of them has striped underwear and which one of them has solid underwear, or whether we have already handed down this tee shirt from the 13-y-o to the 9-y-o, so all their things get jumbled together in their baskets.

And my daughter and my 3-y-o share a closet in the downstairs hall (where I can supervise them when it is time to put clothes away), so I don't see much point in separating their clothes from each other.  She can tell her clothes apart from her brother's perfectly well.  So those two kids' clothes get jumbled together in their baskets.

Downstairs (cough) "linens"  -- tablecloths, napkins, dishcloths, aprons, cleaning rags, etc. -- go in  another basket.  If I finish sorting before the 3yo is done with his bath, I will fold and separate these to make putting them away easier.  My stuff goes in my basket and my husband's stuff goes in his basket.  Since the upstairs linen closet is right there and nobody else can fold a fitted sheet without making me want to scream at them, I put those things away as I go.

Theoretically the kids are supposed to put their clothes and the downstairs linens away on Thursday mornings, before our co-schooling people show up, and they do unless I forget to tell them to.

So, not too different from Dorian's system, but lower-frequency.

It isn’t totally bump free, but it works well enough, especially since nobody in the entire house gives a flying $%(*# about wrinkles. Thank God I married another engineer.

 

Full-time.

Time for a blurry cell-phone selfie in the mirror in my closet:

That's not-quite twenty weeks.  I feel bigger than I look, I think.

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The other day, in the YMCA locker room, was the first time that someone said to me with a smile, "So is this your first pregnancy?"   

I love the shock value of "No, it's my fifth."  The wide eyes and the Wow.   I am pretty sure this makes me a bad person.

+ + +

I was pregnant with just number four the first time someone else -- in the same locker room -- followed that question with a brief lecture on overpopulation destroying the planet.  

I said, "I think we should welcome and accept children from all kinds of familes, don't you?"

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I have to tell you, I'm absolutely tickled to be pregnant with my fifth child.  Whether there would likely be a number five was a much-discussed subject around here.

 I really didn't know what kinds of feelings to expect -- I have experienced each pregnancy with more ambivalence than you might think, considering that none were surprises.   There's just so much going on physically, and so much preparation to make, and the ever-looming Day of No Choice that comes some estimated day in the future, and the hopes for a good outcome and the worries about all the bad things that might happen.

So I'm pleasantly surprised to find myself simply happy about this new child, and about the prospects of being mother-of-five, which just has a very cool ring to it, don't you think?  I feel like I'm earning a shiny new badge.

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At the same time there's been a sort of odd stop-in-my-tracks realization that, indeed, the way this story is turning out is that I am spending my entire, er, career or active life or whatever you want to call it, almost exclusively mothering.   I mean, I kind of knew that this was what was going to happen, but it sort of hit me in the last few months.

Don't ask me why this is hitting me now and not the last time I was pregnant.   I was thirty-five years old when I had my fourth baby, and what with the general intention to keep homeschooling as long as it is working out, I was already quite clearly not expected to be off the hook for full-time involvement until my mid-fifties.  I'll be thirty-nine when I have number five, which brings me into later-mid-fifties, not that big of a difference really.  

(Perhaps it feels big because I lost my own mom when she was fifty-four; in that sense there was and is an infinite distance between mid- and late fifties.)

I haven't, either, chosen to keep active in my field even part-time on the side -- I explored it for a while, and decided I didn't want the added stress; and I haven't, either, thrown my extra energy into working for any cause I care about.  The volunteer work I do is local, the kinds of things that parents do to help keep their kids' Scout troops and homeschooling co-ops going from year to year.  

I have a lot of energy, a decent amount of talent for setting up systems and organizing stuff (not people, just stuff); but apparently, I have a limited supply of giving-a-shit.  

Or maybe you could call it a limited supply of caring, and I  can't afford to spend it much except on the people I have relationships with.  

The people who need me, personally, to give a shit about them, and no one else can replace me.

This is not everybody's problem.  I have friends I admire who raise several young children and are also pillars of a community, doing good and useful and vital work.    I am happy for them and grateful for their example (and often beneficiaries of their efforts).

Caring for and about my family, even though there's nothing especially needy about my family, requires my full-time effort.  It seems this will last about as long as I can stand to have a full-time anything.

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That's the thing I wake up surprised about, almost every day:  That it's an endlessly fascinating challenge, that I always have something to think hard about, that I go to bed satisfied almost every night .  I am happy every morning when I step out onto the porch with my coffee and watch the school buses rumble by, or if I happen to glance further down to the end of the block, where the busy east-west road crosses, and can catch a glimpse of the morning rush hour line-up to get onto the highway.

My job takes me nowhere that I am not curious to explore.   And I've signed up for another adventure, is what it feels like.  And I haven't had time to pack yet, but I will.

The hypothesis which is mine.

I have this hypothesis about parenting...

...yes, I still have some hypotheses left after four empirical children!

...that went into my thinking as Mark and I were discussing whether to go for number five.

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(MY thinking, mind you.   I don't want this to become the sort of mommyblog post where the author writes "I prayed about this" and "I deeply felt that" and "It seemed to me that we should" and at the same time leaves entirely unmentioned, as if unimportant, any hint of involvement of The Husband in the discernment.  So.  Without having to dive into other aspects of this rather complicated subject, and so preserving the proper intimacy of the marital relationship, let's just toss it on the table that this is purely my hypothesis, and if it proves totally wrong, it's me who has to walk it back and not him.)

The line of reasoning goes like this.

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(1)  Raising teenagers is reputed to be difficult and confusing, such that in the absence of any actual difficulty, the prospect of setting out on the journey with children ages 13 to 19 intimidates.

(2)  Intimidation depletes confidence.

(3) A parent who can maintain a sense of confidence is a parent who can remain assertive:  authoritative without being authoritarian, just without being judgmental, cautious without being overprotective.  

(4) Confidence comes, in part, from regularly engaging in challenging tasks that require well-developed skills:  from seeing before you a job that you know will be difficult enough to require your careful attention, while (because you know you have the skills, or perhaps because you have done it before) you fully expect you will succeed.

(4a) In other words:  flow!

(5) Suppose you're working at a job that presents you with some intimidating tasks, tasks that require yet-undeveloped skills, and you quail before them because you're not at all sure you will succeed at them.   It's nice, then, if your job also entails some other tasks which are quite routine, mindless even, and so less psychologically exhausting, a place you can escape to -- without slacking off, since those routine tasks must also be done.  

It's even better if your job entails, too, some flow-rich tasks, the kind that are psychologically absorbing in a good way; things that call on the full exercise of the skills you're most confident in.  You emerge from the other side of those not rested but energized -- feeling competent and valuable -- and with some perspective you can remember that once, too, those skills were underdeveloped, and yet you developed them, and look where you are today.

It can almost make you excited about learning new skills.  Though the risk of failure is ever-present, that is what makes new skills worth developing.  Who would care about skill if success is inevitable?  Where could you find flow?

(6)  So it's a good idea to arrange your workload to contain plenty of challenging-but-well-within-your-ability tasks, and a sprinkling of routine-and-kind-of-mindless tasks, at the same time that you embark upon a new and intimidating project with considerably high stakes.

(7) Therefore, I should have a new baby the same year my first child becomes a teenager.

 

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So, I'll let you know how that goes, hm?

Lillian Gilbreth, the original domestic engineer.

Neat article at Slate about how she revolutionized the American kitchen.

To quantify the efficiency of the Kitchen Practical, and a later, similar kitchen designed for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine, Gilbreth used a metric from the motion study of the production line: steps. As described in the 1931 Better Homes Manual,

The test of the efficiency of the new kitchen was made with strawberry shortcake...The cake was first made in a typically haphazard kitchen…Then an exactly similar shortcake was prepared in the Herald Tribune Kitchen, which has the same equipment and utensils as the other kitchen, but has them arranged for efficiency. The results of this test were so startling as to be almost unbelievable. The number of kitchen operations had been cut from 97 to 64. The number of actual steps taken had been reduced from 281 to 45—less than one-sixth!

...In the 1940s, what Gilbreth called “circular routing” became known as the kitchen “work triangle,” a concept that designers still rely on today.

I feel a certain kinship with this woman's style. And if only she had gotten her way with respect to countertop heights, we short cooks would have even more to thank her for.