Sunday night.

Sunday night. 10 o'clock. I'm feeling sleepy. I'm thinking about work. I'm thinking about shopping. I'm thinking about how I have so many more chores to do. I can't keep up with my chores. I guess it could be organization and work habits. I just don't feel like I have enough hours in the day to do anything. Or I mean everything. This feels like my theme right now. I must learn to be a more efficient worker. The funny thing is I never thought of myself as an inefficient worker. But I guess maybe I am not not efficient but neither am I efficient. I dunno. Partly it's work.

I found the catch to my great salaried part-time job with flexibility and benefits. The catch is it's really probably like a 30+ hr/wk job and they hire you and pay you for 20. They all told me going in that it was 20-30 hrs of work/wk. I figured that meant I would be able to keep it to 20. Because, well, I dunno. I just figured I could. But I can't. All the faculty and my boss say keep track of your hours, don't work too many hours, etc. And that's great. I mean that's amazing. But the thing is, I have things that have to be done. Things that if I don't do, people will notice. Things that if I don't do *I* will notice. Plus I'm slower right now since I'm still new and getting familiar with things. But it's hard. It's hard to take too much time to do things. It's hard because I know I'm not getting paid for it, but really it's hard because it means time away from my family, and it means time keeping Aaron from doing his work.

There just isn't enough time.

I scrubbed the living room floor today. This is something that needs to be done at least once a week. I'm lucky if I do it once a month. I simply cannot keep the place clean with lack of time, melting snow, muddy drive ways, dirty dog feet, and, you know, us. Dishes and laundry are hard enough to keep up with, let alone real cleaning.

My work time is Sam sleeping time, for the most part. He has now discovered the TV so he will beg to watch Nemo and that will usually give me a few minutes to do stuff. So usually once he goes to sleep I take 20-30 minutes decompression quiet self time. Which usually means email (work and fun) and some random Internet surfing. Then I decide I should get something productive done, so I work on that for maybe an hour, and then usually Sam is up again, or it might be my bed time. So that's not a lot of time for chores.

But this must be the struggles every parent feels. I suppose it will continue to get easier as he gets older. And I will settle into my job. It will not always be such a busy week. And I will become more efficient at my tasks.


Little Sam notes:
He got his first haircut!! Monumental. He looks so much more like a kid without his straggly baby locks.

He LOVES Finding Nemo. Especially the ritual scene where they sing "ha hwa he ha ho ho ho" and will try to sing along or will sing that to get me to put Nemo on the TV.

I guess, in a way, he uses his voice to communicate a variety of things. He says Mom, he says "ma" with his hand to his face (like putting a cupped hand to your mouth when shouting -- he learned this from Juan) to call for Meg. He says "ooh oooh" when he wants to watch the Who. He says "bababa" when he wants to hear the Who sing "Barbara Ann". He says an authoritative "Ga!" when calling for or yelling at Clyde. He says "bay" or "bee" when he sees a picture of a baby. He sometimes says "bambow" for rainbow. And the "ah ooh ah" for the ritual scene in Finding Nemo...

So those random snippets describe where I'm at right now. A bit scattered. Oh, and I totally have cabin fever. I want to move. I want the sun. I want to go to a beach. I want a new environment. I want to settle, but I want change.