Time

Summer routines

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The summer rule at our house is “no screen time until after noon.”  It’s been that way for a few years, when I realized that once the TV went on, it didn’t turn off easily.  It’s not so hard keeping the kids from starting it…..it can be quite difficult getting them to stop.  So we solved the problem by slapping down the rule, which also covers the computer and time on the Wii, and we really haven’t met with too much resistance.  I truly don’t mind the kids watching TV in the afternoon, especially in July when it’s one hundred nasty, sticky degrees outside.  Flopping down on the floor of an air-conditioned house sounds pretty appealing to me, too; and with the DVR we can watch when they want, and skip the ads.

That leaves the morning for errand running and playing outside, before it gets too hot out.  Then we tend to hibernate for the rest of the day (though not necessarily in front of a screen).

What I didn’t expect was my reaction to our rule this summer.  I was a little shocked at how much I felt the pull to get on the computer; I was really angry with myself, for awhile, for how difficult it was for me to give up my own “screen time.”  But then it hit me:  it was messing with my routine.

For an entire school year I’ve dropped the kids off at school, come home, grabbed my coffee, and hit the computer.  I’d balance the checkbook first thing, and then move on to checking e-mail and other assorted tasks.  That’s nine months of establishing a habit that I was suddenly forced to break.  It’s not so much that I’m addicted to the computer or screen time or e-mail or any one of those things; it’s simply this is what I do next.

That realization was a great comfort to me.  Instead of getting angry with myself for being so drawn to the computer, I can simply remind myself gently that it’s hard to change a habit.  Our summer schedule is so much simpler:  I’m loving my time with my kiddos, our extra snuggle time in the mornings, and not having to be out the door at 8:00AM sharp….if I can enjoy all these other changed-for-summer routines, surely I can get over any lack of computer time.

How far we’ve come…..

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I’ve made all my snobby pronouncements about how people waste time on the internet:  too much Facebook, too much Twitter, too much Angry Birds, etc.  I can sit on my high horse and make those comments because I’m rarely spending time on them.  Checking in on Facebook once a day hardly takes over my life, and I’m not on Twitter at all.  I’ve even (gasp!!) never actually played Angry Birds.  Maybe if I did I’d really like it…..but I haven’t bothered to try it yet.

So now I’ll ‘fess up to how I waste my time online.  (And I can really, really waste some time with this.)

I look at houses.

It started out of necessity:  every time we’d move and be, literally, house shopping, I’d hop online and look at houses; sorting which might be a possibility and which we could rule out.  Even after a move, though, and even now when we’re done moving (knock on wood), I love to look at houses.  When I’m driving the kids to school, or coming home from the grocery store, seeing a new “For Sale” sign in a yard prompts an immediate thought of Oh!  I’ll have to look that one up!  The Realtor.com app on my phone should be disabled, and instead I downloaded another local real estate app.  (Because some listings have more photos, that’s why.)  I can spend an embarrassingly long time scrolling through “Nearby Homes For Sale.”  When it was a hundred degrees last summer, I humored myself by looking at houses in Maine.

I have absolutely no pangs of discontent as I look; I’m not dealing with envy or jealousy, or frustration with our own home.  (I like this house so much that my response might be something like, that’s a cool house, but I’d rather have mine.)  I’m not desiring “more” or “better.”  I just like to look at houses.

What’s fun, on occasion, is to pull the map over to where our first home was; to zoom in on our old neighborhood and click to see homes for sale.  Looking through those photos, all those little identical ranch homes…it really does take me back to where we were, years ago.  And I’m torn about the change in our standard of living.

Our first house had three bedrooms and one bath, which would have provided our (then non-existent) kids with their own bedrooms; though I suppose one bath could have made for some occasional discomfort.  It had a living room and a nice-sized eat-in kitchen and a one-car garage.  Laundry hook-ups were in the kitchen.  What more, really, even now, do we need?  Admittedly, jobs dictated moves, but I wonder if we’d stayed in that town how long we could have lasted in that home; how long we could have made do with what we had and made it work–probably pretty well, actually.  At what point would we have been crowded and uncomfortable, with two kids in that little house?  Would we have just sent them outside more often?  At what point would I have been completely frustrated with a one-car garage?  When would I have decided that huddling in a hallway listening to tornado sirens wasn’t enough, and I wanted a basement, now?  I truly don’t think we would have stayed there forever.

My husband actually mentioned our first home recently (commenting that we would have had that house paid off by now), and I asked him if he thought we would have stayed put, if jobs hadn’t interfered.  He smiled and pointed out that I would have found some classic Craftsman bungalow closer to “downtown” and we would have ended up there instead.  (Sigh.  So true.)

I look around three moves later, though, to see the accumulation of the fourteen years of stuff after that first house, stuff that has grown and expanded to fill the space offered, and I do wonder how to get back to what we need.  To peel back the layers of excess and get down to the basic needs of running a home.  Not a bare, spartan home, but not an extravagant home, either:  a comfortable, peaceful home, where people have what they need and aren’t buried by any more.

Priorities

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          Sometimes, I think we’re really confused.  Sometimes, I want to grab people and shake them and yell at them about what’s truly important, and what just doesn’t matter at all.  Sometimes, I think people have their priorities completely backwards and upside down.  And then, sometimes, I see something like this:
My girl recently lost two teeth, and went to kindergarten roundup, my boy is just about potty-trained, and my baby is almost sleeping through the night.  Time is going by too too too fast. In light of these recent events, I have decided that I want to spend more time enjoying my beautiful babies and less time doing things that don’t matter, like playing on Facebook, returning emails, and obsessing… over keeping the house picked up.  I don’t want to look back on these precious, fleeting years with regret.  I’ll still update y’all periodically, but I’m not going to spend so much time reading about you all. Forgive me for not keeping up with your business.  And, if you happen to come to our house, you may have to step over a pile or two of laundry, you may trip on some Thomas trains, and our beds may not be made.  You have been warned.  🙂
…and I’m struck by the idea that there are people who “get it.”  They may be few and far between, but there are people who understand where their priorities need to be.
          I’m convinced that there’s a generation (or more) of us that are going to suddenly look up and realize that they spent their entire life online; that, once tallied, their “downtime” playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook actually ate months of their total life.  That we are someday going to be old and gray and dying, and realize, as we look back, that we forgot to actually do any living.
          My husband recently withdrew from an MBA program; with his work schedule, it was a second evening each week away from home and family, and it was very unclear if the degree would really help him in any way, job-wise.  (He jokes that he did a “cost-benefit analysis.”)  The first Tuesday he didn’t go to class, he was playing football outside with the kids.  The second Tuesday, he attended the art fair at their school, and we all went out to dinner together.  There’s no doubt that you could create a persuasive argument that his decision “hurt” our future; that he might stall out in his job, that he could make “so much more” if he’d stayed with the program.  But our children are children only once.  We get no do-overs.  And I’m unbelievably blessed to be married to someone who chooses family.
          I’m dealing with choices as well; as my mornings fill up, my kid-free writing time has nearly disappeared.  My goal of a post a day, Monday through Friday, was pretty much shot with the arrival of spring break.  Am I going to sit parked in front of a computer when my kids are around?  Or am I going to actually be a mom, and do my best to enjoy my kiddos while they’re here?  I’m voting kids.  Because I don’t want to look up one day and realize that they’re grown and gone, that I’m nearing the end, and that I spent my life sitting in front of a computer, even if I was doing something worthwhile and productive.
          What are your priorities?  If someone on the outside watched how you spend your time, would your priorities be clear?  If you logged each and every minute of how you spent your day, what would that look like; what would it show?  Would it prove you value what you say is important to you?  How are we spending this life we’ve been blessed with?  Because I think we forget that someday it’s gone.

A Different Kind of Clutter

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I was sitting on the sofa at the end of the day when my husband asked me if I was feeling all right.  “No,” I admitted, “I’m not.  And I have no idea what’s wrong.”  We’d had lots of sickness in the house at that point, and I just attributed it to “maybe I’m starting to come down with something.”  I let it go.

As I lay in bed later, though, it finally hit me.  I’d had no time alone in….let’s see….I began to count back.  I hadn’t been alone in the house for almost three full weeks.  I’d had something to do, places to go, or the kids had had days off school for three weeks.  As a full-fledged introvert, it’s no wonder I was feeling so “off.”  Once I’d made that realization, I immediately started feeling better; just knowing what was the matter helped me improve, and I could start thinking forward to when I could make “alone time” a possibility in my future.  (Even knowing it was almost a week away gave me something to hope toward.)

I realize there are millions of Type A people out there, who thrive on “lots to do” and “busy-busy-busy!!”  I am not one of them.  So when I got to that point of being overwhelmed, I didn’t even recognize it for what it was.  I had too much “stuff” in my life:  not material, tangible possessions, but “stuff” on the calendar, which had filled up so gradually I hadn’t really noticed it.  I’d joked with other moms about how each “kid-free” morning had filled up with something to do; how quickly it went from “Gosh, both the kids are in school!  Freedom!” to “Gotta run!  Too much to do today!”

When things get too bad, too busy, I try to remember a quote referenced in Celebration of Discipline:  “I find He never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.”  (pg. 128; from Thomas Kelly.)  I need to remember:

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.”  (Psalm 23:2-3)

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.”  (John 14:27)

“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you.”  (Isaiah 26:3)

“Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”  (Psalm 34:14)

I challenge you to evaluate your calendars.  Do you see “peace” or an “intolerable scramble?”  I pray “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  (Philemon 1:3)

Two thoughts about Time….

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I was trying to clean up after dinner on one of my “husband’s gone” nights.  It was one of those nights where you look at the mounds of dishes piled all over the counter (even after the kids load their own stuff) and just want to crawl into a hole and not come out.  I also wanted to get the kids in their respective tubs so I could be “done” for the day, but I knew that I didn’t want to come back downstairs to the dinner mess, once everything had congealed and gotten even nastier.  The kids were heading to the basement to play a new “game” they devised that always started out with lots of laughing and wrestling and always ended with them just beating the crap out of each other; I really wanted to head them off at the pass and say, “No!  Upstairs and into the bath!”…but again, I wanted to be done with the kitchen mess.  So I compromised.  I informed them that I would set the timer for ten minutes.  They could play and I would clean for ten minutes; then it was straight upstairs into tubs.  I figured no one would get too injured in only ten minutes of playing, and even if I didn’t get everything in the kitchen finished, I would have at least gotten started.

Ten minutes.  This is what I got done in ten minutes:

Completely emptied the dishwasher.

Rinsed and loaded all dinner dishes, including the crock pot insert.

Wiped down the table and all counters.

Pitched recycling into the blue box in the garage.

The only thing that didn’t get done in those ten minutes was setting up the coffee pot for the next morning.  I couldn’t believe it.  Now, I was booking it; I don’t usually move that quickly.  But it really is incredible how much you can accomplish in a small amount of time if you just do it.

My second observation on time involves me being a total jerk.  Do, please, forgive me for being a nag, just this once, and humor my rant.  For all the people who say they just don’t have any time…..

Skip one TV show.

Get off Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest for fifteen minutes.

Drop five three-minute You-tube videos.

Give up a round of Angry Birds.

I said to my husband the other day that it’s amazing the amount of time we spend not actually doing anything.  I found out how much I could accomplish in a tiny amount of time….but I still have to decide to use my time wisely.  It’s my choice.

Lecture’s over.  Thanks for your patience.  I will now return to my attempts to encourage and not berate.