Great Expectations

It's amazing the number of things I don't get done in a day. When supper is over and the evening has come, I sit back and think, "What did I do again?" An entire day gone and I am lucky if I can find three things I finished.

To be honest, I know this is partly due to fast internet connection. My friends and I do not call each other, we email. It is so much easier to just type out a response and hit send, than to try to talk to someone over the sudden onslaught of needs that a phone call induces in children. I also use my connection to fill out the boys' school curriculum. We are free-schoolers so there is quite a bit of search and print going on in the late afternoons for tomorrow's school.

Part of the problem is that once a chore is done, it seldom stays that way more than an hour. Case in point, the living room floor. The living room is a full 25% of the house, so having it clean is a big deal to me. (That and I have a thing about clean carpets.) Each day I start off and end the day, picking up toys, socks, shoes, blankets, school books and various snack items that have been left out. I vacuum at least once a day, usually more like 2-3 times, and yell at the boys to help me with the pick up at least once a day. Within two hours of my morning cleaning today the boys had put out a picnic blanket and cracked hard boiled eggs for lunch leaving little shells and pieces of egg all over the floor again. All this while I swept and mopped the kitchen. Sigh.

Somewhere in my head I have this never ending list of all the things I think I should be able to do in a day. I'm not sure where this list came from, but I have NEVER finished it. I think it may have been made in China. A while back I tried having a lists of three to five things that I wanted to finish for the day. Those worked pretty well, until I was done. After that I made another list, and another, and another, and always ended up mad that I couldn't finish that LAST list. Maybe it isn't that I am not getting much done. Maybe it is more about getting used to the idea that some things, like chore lists for homeschooling moms, are never ending and finding a way to say, "I did good" for the things I do get done, whether they stay done or not.