The silence is palpable as a tumbleweed spins across your path. This place seems like it’s been dead for quite some time. It’s nothing but a ghost town.
Okay, so maybe that’s a bit melodramatic, but I haven’t exactly been pounding out the pieces as of late, making this place a virtual deserted city.
I’ve meant to. Truly. I can’t tell you how many times the phrase “blog posts” or sometimes “blog posts!!!!” has been scrawled out on my daily planner, never to be crossed out, left out of the reindeer games of the day like poor little Rudolph. Even those four extra exclamation points haven’t been able to add extra time to the day, even if they have increased the amount of guilt for it.
I at first thought that the greatest challenge in having a second child would be remembering or re-learning how to care for a baby again. I was surprised to find that this came back pretty easily. What I hadn’t really understood was that the greatest challenge to a second child is juggling the care a baby needs alongside the growing needs of a three year old.
From the moment we wake around 5:30 or 5:45 (or earlier if the cats are feeling particularly saucy that morning), it feels like a whirlwind begins, feeding cats, showering, dressing, cleaning litter boxes, prepping lunches, waking kids, getting the little guy on the potty, dressing kids, out the door, a full workday, and then back again around 6 for the nightly responsibilities of dinner, bathtime, storytime, bedtime, and a little bit of playtime or family time squeezed in the moments between.
If both my wife and I are in the same room at the same time, that often means a divide and conquer strategy, with one of us handling the baby while the other plays with, talks with, keeps engaged, our three year old son.
And that has left very little time for much else. Yes, yes, I’ve heard the “just work on it when the kids are asleep” or “get up earlier” suggestions before, and I admit, it certainly was more doable with a growing little boy who eventually had a bedtime, and went to sleep. But with a new baby in the mix, his bedtime doesn’t mean free-time, just the two of us to handle the baby at once instead of the divide and conquer of earlier in the evening.
I truly don’t know how some folks do it, and to those of you who do, I commend you. I really, really do. Bravo. But I have to ask, how? How does one balance a full day of work, kid pickups and drop offs, home life and responsibilities, and still find the time to write and blog on such a regular basis? Are you all wearing chrono-belts that let you slow down the time-stream? Tell me your secrets!!!! 🙂
Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab your collar like that. I got a little carried away.
It has, admittedly, been tough to find time to do anything.
That’s not bad. First, it won’t always be this way. Before we know it, that three year old boy will be a six year old boy, 12 year old boy, 18 year old boy, and off into adulthood. That little baby girl will shortly after be doing the same. There are moments where sure, we think to ourselves that we’d like the time to do things we want, but let’s be honest – it never outweighs what we don’t want – for this time to go by in a blink, for these moments to blow past us like a drag race.
No, no, no.
These are the times to savor, to enjoy, to live.
Having the memories written to reflect upon one day might be nice, but they’re only half a memory if they aren’t truly lived.
Yes, we all get down on ourselves for not always accomplishing the things on our to-do list, whether it be a room clean-up or repair around the house, or a blog post to be written.
But no, it’s not terrible, and I think we all need little reminders of that when we start to feel that we don’t always have the luxury of time we once had for such things.
It’s not bad. It just means that we’re too busy being parents and living life with our children to actually always write about it.
I’d rather take take the moments as fully as they can be than to forsake them or short change them for the sake of writing them down.
The Dorky Daddy 