How do you do it all?!
I get this question regularly. The short answer is that I just don’t sleep, at least not much. For the long answer, click read more.
My problem is that I don’t want to give up anything up so I push myself to keep going all day and much later at night than I should.
I have 4 kids 5 and under and that alone keeps me insanely busy, but I also insist on trying to keep my house perfectly clean. I want anyone to be able to stop by any time and find it clean. I want people to be able to open any cupboard or drawer and find everything perfectly organized. I will fret for days about someone coming to my house for the first time and I’ll start staying up late trying to organize and clean rooms and drawers that they’re not likely to even see. I tell myself that if they see the house perfectly clean a few times I can start to ease up and stress less because messiness would be a fluke, but I still usually try to “over-clean†each time.
My other obsession is picture taking. At this moment I have 16,963 pictures posted to flickr and 149 pictures waiting to be sorted, fixed, labeled, tagged, and posted. I’ve taken more than 1,484 pictures since January which works out to about 424 per month. By the end of 2009 I had taken, labeled, tagged, and posted 3,779 pictures (314 per month). In other words, I take a lot of pictures and I am still increasing the amount of pictures taken.
I also blog, as you well know if you’re reading this. I like to keep updated on people’s lives through facebook and blogs. I enjoy reading other’s blogs and I feel an obligation to blog more often both as a means of journal writing and because I know it helps those who I don’t get a chance to communicate with regularly, still feel connected to my life and my family. I tend to blog in fits and starts. I’m trying to make it more regular and have been doing a decent job at that lately.
So when I say I don’t sleep, although I’m kidding, there’s a little too much truth to that. There are so many things that I want to do, but I can’t even get started till after all the kids are in bed. We put the older three to bed at 7:30. Ila generally falls asleep around 10:00 or 11:00. That’s the time that I can finally clean up the things I didn’t get to earlier in the day, finish any regular chores like packing lunches, take my daily shower, and sit at my computer for blogging, reading, and uploading pictures. I sometimes tell myself that I should go to bed, but by the time I finish most of those things it’s already 1:00 AM. So I find myself regularly going to bed at or after 1:00 AM and getting up with kids starting at 5:30 AM. And I take no naps, unless you count the times I nod off while feeding Ila during the day. It was almost a relief last night when the power went out at 12:30 last night because I couldn’t do any of those things and just had to go to bed (cleaning by flashlight just didn’t sound worthwhile).
doesn’t all that missed sleep catch up with you?? i think your secret (besides persistence and late nights) must be your energy level. you must have LOTS of energy naturally to keep up with all that! and i’ve been enjoying your more frequent blogs by the way too :)
I generally feel the most tired when my amount of sleep changes. So more sleep and less sleep both make me tired. If I take a nap, it makes me feel like I need one everyday so I make the best of the incidental naps I take when I fall asleep for a moment or two while feeding Ila. Somehow, I’m used to the level of sleep I get now, although getting up in the morning is hard.