Slammed
Give me a few more days and hopefully I’ll be able to spend some time here.
Work was already taking more of my time since one of our assistants is out on maternity leave and no one was hired to replace her temporarily. But now the “hiring freeze” they announced a while back is really hurting, since we had someone retire and no one will be hired to fill that position. His work load has been divided amongst the rest of us, and it’s taking a bit of time to get up to speed on the portion I’ve been given. They said they were doing the hiring freeze instead of laying people off, so I guess in the end it’s a good thing.
GlitterGirl was given a project Monday that is due Friday. The only problem being that she’s got things going on this week in the evenings on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Meaning that I came home early yesterday and when she walked in the door we started working on it, and between the project and homework and dinner, she was still up an hour past her bedtime getting it all done. She was almost impossible to get up this morning, too.
I have to leave work early again today, too. GG and TT both have somewhere to be this evening so RK and I are having to each take one of them. How do single parents do this with more than one kid?
I know there are some things I need to handle on the site, but the truth is that it’s just going to have to wait. I trust the moderators to make the right decisions, and I’ll stand behind their decisions. Why can’t people just behave and follow the rules and not purposefully stir up crap so that we don’t have to handle it, though? Is that really too much to ask? Yeah, apparently it is.
Now? I can’t wait for tomorrow evening. Twilight, dinner out, and the ability to make as much noise as I want without worrying about kiddos waking up.
And right now? I’ve taken longer doing this than I planned and I’ve got to rush to make lunches and get out the door.
November 20th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I liked your post today, RQ. Haven’t our lives gotten crazy? But it’s a wonderful, couldn’t wait to get here kind of crazy. I remember life before kids, and it was so organized, neat and very Martha Stewart. Now, I can’t find matching socks in the morning. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Doing it all as a single mom can be challenging, but speaking for myself, I’ve learned to compensate. We don’t have activities during the week. Weeknights are saved for homework, playing out in the yard, having supper together and just being a family. I run the Daisies troop myself so that I can hold meetings on Friday nights, and we find swimming classes or whatever the chosen activity is on Fridays and Saturdays. I always make sure we have a lot of down time to just hang out and enjoy each other.
I also let a lot of things slide. My dishes from lastnight are still in the sink. We were too busy sticking cloves into oranges for Thanksgiving ornaments. The toys from two nights ago still aren’t put away. I’ve been too busy making winter sweaters for the girls at night. Oh, and I got rid of our microwave. We use the time it takes to heat up the oven and actually cook our supper to talk, play or get started on homework. It works for us.
I would love to be a stay-at-home mom, but obviously it can’t happen as a single mom. So I just try to make the very most of every single minute we have together from 4:00 on.
November 20th, 2008 at 9:55 am
For my small part in the Chaos…… I apologize. But I am not at all surprised. I may expand upon that comment someday.
AW
November 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Your life could be our life right now. We also crazy with work associates leaving and we have to cover for them. DD is only in preschool but we have ballet lessons, Chinese lesson, kindergarten registration, etc to contend with. It is nice to now that ours is a normal condition.
I am in awe not only of single moms who do this, but family with more than one child. One seems to be about all we can handle.
Have a great date this weekend!
klem
November 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I’ve often wondered how single moms do it. DH works 24 hour shifts which gives him a lot of time home but occasionally he gets overtime which we can’t afford to turn down. Recently he was gone 72 hours straight; I thought I was going to go crazy with the schedules. We try to find activities that allow you to make up classes on another day if needed. Jason takes karate 2 days a week; he can pick any 2 days out of the 5 they’re open and he can show up 3 days in a week or more if he wants to make up a class. Jess goes to gymboree which allows days to be made up. She loves gymnastics but I need to find somewhere that is as flexible as we need.