One Thing At a Time

This morning, as I stood in the kitchen, in the midst of prepping chicken soup, lunchboxes, and unloading the dishwasher…all at once, my husband walked through. “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done today,” I shared, although the Sunday to-do list was just the usual…

“I find just focusing on one thing at a time helps,” he said casually, still moving through the kitchen.

“There are just so many things to get done,” I whined.

“Moms seem to have that problem,” Arnauld continued. “Just get it done, one thing at a time.”

I just glared at him. But in my head I was thinking, “It must be nice to have the luxury of focusing on one thing at a time…”

Sitting here at the end of the day, I drew out a diagram of how I envisioned my day going versus how it actually went.

Everything was on track until I remembered that I was part of the group in charge of March breakfast for the staff. Was that this week? A quick text to Dawn confirmed it was Tuesday! I had to make an unplanned trip to Target, even though I was just there yesterday.

Before heading to the store, I mentioned to Rose that she could come with me if she promised to clean up the basement when we got home. When we got back from Target, she got to work but was soon in tears, overwhelmed by the mess she had been creating over the last few weeks. I wasn’t planning on helping, but I knew if I jumped in, it would get done right. We ended up hanging up the dance costumes that had collected in the bottom of the closet, moved furniture to vacuum up beads that had been spilled, and put everything back in the right place.

While Rose and I were cleaning, I sent Adi up to clean the sunporch…I had also noticed some bead spillage out there. But I had to get involved with that too because Adi thought it would be a good idea to vacuum up a full spool of string rather than pick it up off the ground. Wrestling with the vacuum was not on my timeline for the day. But in the end, the sunporch looked a lot better.

By the time I was rushing through the kitchen, heading out to toss some trash in the garbage, Arnauld said, “Do you need me to take Wren to dance?” I knew we were up against the clock.

“I’m leaving now,” I barked grabbing my bag, swapping out a load of laundry before finally making it outside with the garbage. Wren was already waiting in the car. This time it was her turn to glare at me.

I brought my book to get some grad school reading done while I waited for Wren’s half hour rehearsal to finish, but instead I chatted with another mom.

When I got home, I jumped right back into cleaning. The bathrooms were overdue and they could not wait. While I scrubbed toilets, I asked the girls if they wanted to plant the seeds we bought while at Target today. The sunshine and spring like temperatures had made me miss my grandparents this weekend and I had imagined the pots, labeled with masking tape that lined their window sills, the tiny seeds that would fill their summer garden. We have never had much success growing plants from seeds, but I felt determined this was our year.

So, after I was done with the bathrooms, I headed outside to help the girls fill pots with soil, plant seeds, and label each pot. We placed them in the now clean sunporch with a promise to come back and water them regularly.

After a late lunch prepared by Arnauld, we headed out for a quick walk. We couldn’t not get some fresh air on such a beautiful day. We ended up meeting up with neighbors and collected more kids on bikes as we made our way through the neighborhood. We ended up down the hill, catching up with friends we hadn’t seen all winter.

When we got home, I was adamant that I would get my workout in, so as I sent the girls upstairs to shower, I headed to the basement for a quick workout. When I finished, I was going to head right for the shower, but then , I noticed that the dishwasher was now clean, so I decided to unload it so I didn’t have to do it later.

Then, instead of showering, I sat down to Slice. Better to get that out of the way too.

I’m heading upstairs to shower now…I hope nothing distracts me on the way.

My day didn’t go quite as I planned, they never really do.