Tuesday Morning Real Talk

I'm stealing 15 minutes for real talk.  This shit is hard.  Super duper awfully hard.  Harder than last year.  Harder than being home.  And being home is HARD.  But...I'm having a harder time than ever.  And sometimes I feel like that's a new normal, which defeats me.

I'm stressed because teaching is so much more work than I remembered.  There is always something else to plan, ALWAYS something new to implement, and routines to master, and so many meetings.  I also forgot how great it is to bond with a class and start to love them, so that helps.  But honestly, loving them means I put more emotionally into the room.  And after exercising patience and coming up with logical consequences and being kid-friendly all day, coming home and doing the same thing for Milo drains me.  I went from loving 2 kids to 22.  That's one curve.

Then I started grad classes, and they're GRAD classes, so there is a lot of work and discussion posting.  It's a class about families and their influence on children's lives and how to involve them in the classroom community, which I find so interesting.  My first project is a brief genealogy and lifestyle analysis of the last 3 generations of my family!  I would do that for fun!  But I have NO TIME to devote to this, at all.  If it wasn't required for my license, I would definitely take the  classes a little later, when my kids needed me less.  I keep picturing myself walking in the spring, taking pictures with the boys in my robes, trying to visualize my way out of this one..  But nope.  It's at the bottom of my priority list, but undroppable.

There has been a mix up with daycare, and this is the biggest thing throwing me off.  There were some situations with paperwork and a terrible illness in the family of the lady who watches the boys, and until everything is sorted out, the boys are not going to daycare.  Instead, a neighbor related to the daycare family has been coming to watch the boys at our house.  It sucks.  Ben used to have a small window of free time in the mornings and on Mondays while the boys at school; he did chores and ran errands and got groceries.  That window is gone.  The boys aren't playing with friends, they're here all day in their same boring house, and avoiding that is one of the main things that made me feel good about being a working mom. Ben and I can't take any more time off work than we already have to make going to classes and stuff work, so we're stuck with this solution right now.  It's supposed to be temporary, but it's already been two weeks, and it's wearing on us.

The boys aren't sleeping.  Elliott is teething, or something?  Milo knows how to get out of his crib and does it CONSTANTLY.  We moved Elliott back into our room.  Again.  When Elliott freaks out, Milo stays up because he's scared about his brother crying.  Most of the time, both of them end up in our bed.  We are exhausted.

Honestly, writing our situation out helps me realize that we're doing okay.  I'm focusing on the concept of balance, long and short term.  This part of our lives will be busy and crazy.  There will be other times when we'll miss the chaos.  This month might be awful, but maybe November or March will be more settled.  I know others have it worse.  We're all fighting something.  But right now, I'm wiped.  I'm worried about how wiped Ben is.  I'm looking forward to some sort of break for our family.

Pictures are from this weekend.  We're tired but quite adorable.