Friday, June 3, 2011

Back to Life, Back to Reality


I wouldn't normally say that my life is very busy. My days are certainly full and I certainly don't get done everything I want in a given day, but I can usually sneak in an extra load of laundry or a trip to the grocery store if I get behind in those things. What I mean to say is, as the stay-at-home mom of a toddler I don't have a lot of free-time, but I also don't generally have a long to-do list. I do things as they come up. When Wiggle is tearing around the house like a maniac, we abandon the "plan" of coloring and go to the park instead. If it's raining, we run errands, etc. The week is punctuated by a few scheduled activities, music class, playgroup, the occasional doctor's appt, but mostly we go with the flow.

So imagine my surprise at coming home from vacation and realizing that a huge mountain of things had piled up in my absence. First, even though I left the house relatively clean, a week's worth of cat's hair, which they are also shedding due to the excessive heat we had, was wandering around the house like tumbleweeds. Also, despite having done laundry before we left the cottage, it seemed like there were several loads left to do when we got home. Then, of course,there were bills and general budgeting after the free-spending of vacation.

Even more than the things that actually accumulated during the week we were gone, there are a bunch of things I've been meaning to get to, but hadn't actually attempted to get done. Restringing the patio umbrella I got on freecycle, taking the bag of culled through clothes that's been sitting on the stairs to Goodwill, mending this, putting away that. It turns out, I had really needed my vacation, and now that I am rested and recuperated, I can start getting to those things I had apparently been avoiding for most of the spring. Yea?

To keep that vacation feeling going though, we immediately joined the neighborhood pool, and I plan on spending many a late afternoon lounging around in the water or on a deck chair. Take that, to-do list!