A Week Stuck in Neutral

It's amazing how little I can get accomplished when I have a sick kid at home and no pressing deadlines.

Yeah, it's been that kind of week.

I'm not saying this because I'm proud of it--on the contrary, I'm a little horrified that it is Friday and I've made so little progress on my goals on any front. Here's my score for the week:

Garage 1, Jen 0: Though I've been in the house all week, I didn't exactly feel comfortable leaving Son #3 (age 5) to his own devices so I could go sift through the mess in the garage. I had been so hoping to make some visible progress before my parents got home from their long summer trip, since they have long despaired of seeing the floor of my garage ever again. (For the record, you can see parts of the floor now. Small parts.) They got home yesterday--so much for that ambition. The good news and the bad news are the same: the mess isn't going anywhere. It will have to wait until next week.

Laziness 1, Jen 0: Last week I was getting up regularly to walk a brisk 2 miles each morning before the boys went to school. This week the gravity in my bed has increased, or something. And of course once my husband (who has been a real mensch taking Sons #1 and 2 to school each morning so that I don't have to drag their petri dish little brother out any more than is absolutely necessary) is gone, my opportunity to nip out for a walk around the block is gone with him. By the end of the day, after the nightly homework wrangling and chauffeur duty to the kid activity du jour (soccer, soccer, and more soccer), I'm firmly caught in the gravity well of the couch. Again, next week, right?

House 1, Jen 0: You'd think that days of being entrenched at home would produce a whirlwind of domestic activity, right? Instead, I'm finding that the hours of staring at the same walls are producing a paralysis of action. In theory I have had enough time this week to really give this place a thorough scrubbing. In reality, the more I look, the more I see to do. Have the arms of the dining room chairs always looked that grubby? When did those fingerprints get all over the molding? And why on earth do the boys deposit their dirty socks everywhere but the %&*#@^* hamper? It doesn't help that whenever, for example, I start doing some dishes, Son #3 requests a sandwich, or juice, or that I switch the TV channel, or whatever.

It also doesn't help that I am the Least Motivated Housewife in the Universe. It's not that I don't like living in a clean house. I love living in a clean house. I just am not particularly enthusiastic about spending all my time in the process of actually, well, cleaning. The things I like to do include reading, knitting, getting up to speed on current events, watching good movies, etc.--all things that take time in their own right and are difficult to do while you are, for example, scrubbing toilets. The toilets need to be scrubbed, a clean toilet is a joy to have, and yet, I do not like scrubbing toilets. Add in the fact that housework in a house full of three boys has a certain rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic sense of futility about it, and I think I can be forgiven for my lack of alacrity in jumping to clean things I know will only stay clean as long as I can keep the kids out of the house.

I haven't been completely idle. Examples:

I spent some of the early part of the week putting together materials for a booster club fundraiser. However, I'm not feeling very satisfied with this work, since I have a couple of forms in waiting-for-approval limbo, and I can't do anything further until I get the stamp of approval from the office. I also baked muffins for last night's booster club meeting (with the invaluable help of my friend of battery disposal fame, who brought over 6 eggs when I realized I didn't have any), thus proving that my case of Volunteer Tourette's is by no means cured. (Volunteer Tourette's is a term that same friend coined to describe those of us at school who compulsively raise their hands to volunteer for everything, regardless of the state of their schedules or sanity. Mind you, she's just as bad as the rest of us.)

I took Son #3 to the doctor yesterday morning, on the theory that even though I was 100% sure that all he had was a virus, it wouldn't hurt to check (or to have a doctor's note when he goes back to school after four days out). One copay and a strep test later, and the doctor concluded...he has a virus. We are now past the fevers and into coughing and snot (lots of snot), and I'm reasonably certain he will be back in school on Monday.

I balanced the checkbook, and didn't even swear when it didn't come out right the first time.

And, yes, I started to pick at some of the housework. Our covered patio out back was just one broken appliance away from junkyard status, so I began sweeping and cleaning out there. I vacuumed a vast quantity of black cat hair off of the area rug in our bedroom (and no, I'm not sure why Toothless and Extra choose to play-fight there, unless it is because their fur contrasts nicely with the light-grey background of the rug). I didn't have the fortitude to do much about the continually renewing pile of junk mail, or the disturbing odor that wafted from the refrigerator the last time I opened it, but I suspect those aren't going anywhere. Their time will come.

Clearly I need to be catching up on my TV watching.

I'm not going to make stupid and likely false predictions about how next week is going to be better. First, I can't foresee the future, and second, the universe likes to send me stuff like swine flu and plumbing disasters when I start to get cocky about how nothing else could possibly go wrong. But now that Son #3 seems to be well enough to beat up on Son #2 about how much room he is taking up on the couch, his return to school is blessedly imminent. And with any luck a day or two of checking things off of my to-do list will snap me out of this funk. Right?

Life Gets in the Way

Week Two of the 1,000-Pound Project has been a frustrating return to reality--the reality of too much to do and not enough time to do it in. My husband, who volunteers with our local AYSO region, had signed us up as a backup host family for one of the UK trainers who come in to do a one-week camp. He did warn me a day or so before the start of the week that they were still looking for other host families, so it seemed possible-to-likely that we would end up hosting someone. On Sunday, only a few hours before the trainers were due to arrive in the area, we got the official word that we would be housing one of them.

I can't share my exact response to this news, but I can say that yes, it was a four-letter word, and no, I would not care to hear any of my children repeat it. As a result of my efforts in Week One, various piles of debris remained on the floor in the living room, the front hall, and the hallway to the bedrooms. The boys' rooms looked like they always do when I'm too distracted to keep after the boys to clean up after themselves--like the aftermath of a moderate earthquake. Some quick work was in order.

As you can imagine, those piles of debris I had been working on sorting out went right back into bags and bins. There wasn't a chance that I was going to be able to finishing sorting it out, given that I had to quickly clean up Son #1's room (where we intended our guest to stay) and the boys' bathroom. My husband enlisted the three boys to clear enough room in the other bedroom for us to put down an air mattress for Son #1 to sleep on between his brothers' beds. As for the rest of the house--well, I figured that our guest just might consider the accommodations worth what he paid for them, but would probably be too polite to say so.

That was just the start of the week. The rest of the week included going into school to meet the new principal (I volunteer at our kids' school so much that this summer a little girl approached me at the boys' summer camp and asked me if I worked at the school--not a good sign), taking Son #3 to two swim lessons (makeup and regular), taking Son #1 to his social skills group, tracking down a patch for a hole in the air mattress (we think one of the cats punctured it), taking the older boys back and forth to soccer camp at the park, cooking, cleaning, laundry, more cooking, more cleaning, more laundry. I think the reason I hate housework so much is that it doesn't STAY done. I've done laundry almost every day this week and yet the hampers look just as full as they did at the start of the week.

So Week Two was a definite step backwards. I'm hoping that before Week Three is over I will be able to take the row of bags and boxes that are lined up in the hall to my bedroom to Goodwill and feel like I am making some progress again.