She is always signed on to Facebook…
I saw her pull into the driveway with kid’s meals at lunchtime two days in a row!…
She lets her kids run around outside in their underwear…
Her house is a DISASTER…
She hasn’t done laundry for two years…
What does she do all day????
These are all things that I would not be surprised to hear my neighbors say about me. I still think I’m a good mom, but it took me a while to get to the place where I could accept that, for me, this has very little to do with my housekeeping skills (or lack thereof). In my opinion, housekeeping & homemaking are two very different things. Many times I have looked around my house at the end of the day & seen yesterday’s dishes still in the sink, toys all over the floor, kids that did not get bathed, and thought, “What the heck did I do all day?”
I’ll admit that I had a really hard time with the transition to being a stay at home mom a few years ago. I felt like my identity had been stripped away and everything I had worked hard to achieve in my career, education, etc was being put on pause indefinitely. I felt like all I did was sit around a messy house, unshowered, getting spit up on and changing diapers. I also have a very hard time accepting the changes in my body. While I’m really looking forward to all the blessings another child will bring, I have to say, the baby stage is HARD for me and I’m kind of dreading it. The good news is that it doesn’t last forever, and the stage that comes next is a million times more fun.
The other good news is that I still have all summer and fall to do whatever I want with my now bigger kids. Sometimes whatever I want is to stay inside and color and sit on the couch watching movies all day because being pregnant is exhausting. But, mostly, I need to get out. Often.
I know next year with a 5, 3, and 6-month-old we might not be quite as ambitious with our “adventures”, so I want to pack as much into this summer as I can. (Next year my plan is to turn on the sprinkler and spend every day in the back yard. I think it’s a good plan.)
What I do not do during the day when I am alone with my kids is housework. Sorry, I just don’t. Eddie does all of our laundry because he’s awesome like that and he volunteered to take over when I was pregnant with Abby. I don’t clean until the weekend or when Eddie’s home because I don’t like having chemicals out around my kids when I can’t be 100% attentive to them. (If there was ever a kid who would drink bleach just to see what it tastes like, it is my Nicholas.) Plus, Eddie truly doesn’t mind helping me clean or watching the kids so I can do it, and even when I do clean up during the day it’s just a big mess again by the time he gets home anyway.
Sometimes I do a load of dishes, but that is pretty much it. If I spent my days cleaning my house I would feel like a babysitter/maid/slave and I would resent it, that’s no good for anybody. My husband is willing to come home to a pile of toys and some dirty dishes if it means I feel more fulfilled because I spent my time with the kids doing things I consider to be more worthwhile.
It’s also true that I check Facebook/my email like a bazillion times a day, but that’s mostly because our computer is in the kitchen, where we spend the majority of our time when we are home. Many times I’m signed in, but not actually sitting there, although if I see the red blurb pop up that tells me I have a message, I’ll respond pretty quickly. Also, about half of those times we are signed in because Abby loves looking at the pictures of our family and friends.
I know a lot of my mom friends feel exactly the opposite and they are overwhelmed by the idea of leaving the house to take their kids out as often as I do. They like the idea of serving their families through housekeeping, etc. I know that stuff needs to be done, but I struggle a lot with the idea that a clean sink would somehow make me a better wife/mother. That does not work for me. At all. Some people might think that means I don’t have a”servant’s heart.” I just think I, personally, better serve my children creating memories of fun times we had together than memories of a floor always swept and a kitchen counter always cleared. I’m saving that for when they are off to school. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. 😉
I need to get out of my house pretty much every day or I will turn into a cranky and resentful person that I’m not proud of.
So this summer we will be out and about a lot.
So far we have:
gone to a minor league baseball game
gone bowling a few times
gone outlet shopping twice
gone to meet daddy for lunch twice
gone to a local farm to pick strawberries
gone to Dutch Wonderland (a local amusement park)
gone to a few parks
gone swimming with friends
gone to have lunch with my grandmom at a local diner a few times
We also have plans to spend a few weekends at the beach, hit up our local theater for the $1 movies on Tuesday & Wednesday mornings, go to a few more farms, make good use of our bowling passes, participate in our library’s summer reading/letter rubbing program (they hide stamps in local parks, it’s kind of like geocaching), visit family in Virginia, make a few trips to our local farmer’s market, take a trip to Hershey, boat rides, get our mommy book club back on track…the list goes on.
This week our schedule looks like this:
Monday: Go to the outlets & meet daddy for lunch
Tuesday: Go to a pool party with our Mom N Me friends
Wednesday: Meet friends at a local dairy farm
Thursday: ???
Friday: Pack up and go to the beach
Most of this stuff we do during the week and I feel really blessed to be able to make these memories with the kids and to have an extremely hard-working husband with a good job that affords us these opportunities. If I spent the majority of my time doing housework I feel like I would look back and regret not taking full advantage of this time. I’ve never regretted not getting the dishes done before we left for the park.
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