I’ve been trying to work on my SHE tendencies lately. What’s that you say? SHE? Sidetracked Home Executive. In other words, my house is a mess and I don’t have time to clean it! Where did I learn of this? It was from my mom, another SHE. She emailed me to let me know she is actually making her bed! She was so excited about it and excited to share, that I just had to go have a look at the website, www.flylady.net
I read about the program and thought, hey, this is cool. One habit a month, I can do that! So I signed up. And even though every single email directive I get from them clearly says: “You are not behind! I don’t want you to try to catch up; I just want you to jump in where we are. O.K.?
” I still feel overwhelmed.
I’m very much intrigued by the do-your-morning-routine thing. How do they do the same thing every single morning? I have a husband who goes to work anywhere in a 5 hour span. Sometimes he gets up as early as 4:30am if he has a flight to catch and sometimes as late as 9:30am if he isn’t feeling well. I have two college students with different schedules (one has a class as early as 8am, the other 9:35am, both work afternoons and one does in the evenings) and different inclinations (one goes to bed early and is up early, the other stays up late and gets up late). I have a high school student, who thankfully can now drive herself to school and who has a zero period class, that’s leave for school at 6:30am. And she does, amazingly, every day except for late days, and then it is 9:30am.
I merely work part time in the afternoons, do whatever errands I can’t put off in the mornings and evenings and try to work part time on my web development consulting jobs whenever I can fit it in.
Let’s take in this morning for an example of how a morning can go awry: 1:30am, awakened in the middle of the night and moved to the couch. Actually, this is quite normal. At 4:30am, I was awakened by my cat telling me to let him outside, also very normal. I was awakened by my daughter at 6:15am, a little later than usual. I normally hear her earlier. She said that there was a spider on the wall, could I get rid of it? I said where? She pointed to the wall over the fireplace mantel. Oh, there. Huh. Well, there were two spiders on the ceiling the morning before, one had been fairly close to my head while I exercised on my elliptical machine. (See previous post on “Spring Spiders”) So I got up and vacuumed up that spider.
She left for school by 6:30am and my husband got up and readied himself for work. He mentioned that the shower was barely draining at all and I should go ahead and call Roto Rooter to unplug the drain. He took my car since I was taking his in to the repair shop today. His odometer/speedometer cable broke. And so he left in my car.
As soon as he left my other daughter was up and getting ready for class. I decided to exercise and get ready for my day. She left just before 8am. She said she had a test and I could use her car later, since I would be without one. She’d be back with the car by 11am.
After she left I hurriedly took my bath and got dressed for the day. Then I called Roto Rooter to come unstop the drain in the shower. They said they would be a few hours. So, I calculated that might be when my daughter could help me get the car to the repair shop, so I woke up my son. I figured he could get up 10 min early and pick me up at Hank’s and I’d get him a breakfast burrito there as a bribe. Jack’s repair shop is just around the corner from there.
So I hopped in the car, after making sure he’d pick me up in 15 min, and drove to Jack’s, gave him the lowdown on the car and walked to Hank’s to order the burrito. While walking Roto Rooter called and said the technician was on his way. So, I ordered the burrito and my son drove up, the burrito got done and we made it home. Whew.
So I cleaned out the shower so that the guy could get to the drain (too many shampoos, conditioners and soaps) and took out the rug and put down a towel. It IS my new rug, after all. My son left for class at 9:30am so I finished cleaning up the shower, got out my breakfast stuff, put away the clean dishes and put the dirty ones from late last night and earlier this morning into the dishwasher.
Then the Roto Rooter man arrived and I showed him the shower, wrote him a check and made me my breakfast. After my tea and eggs were ready, he was about done. So I helped him out the door, gave him the check and signed and initialed his paperwork and said, “Have a nice day!”
Finally, I got to eat breakfast and do some other things, like check my email, write this whiny blog and wonder why I can’t get more work done! It was only 10:30am!
So, I’m wondering, what do all those other ladies do about their morning routines? And when will I finally have some habits formed? Aw, well, it hasn’t really been a week just yet… maybe next week?
