Summer Fun and Dropping Balls

  

It’s summer time, the land of laid back fun. Lazy hot summer days filled with lemonade sipping and pool side sitting, and long book reading….or at least that’s how it used to be for me. I remember when my biggest worry was finishing a book after the library was closed and having to wait until the next day to get one.  Now, I feel like my sunblock saturated hands are finding it hard to continue juggling all of the balls of working motherhood. 

Allow me to elaborate; summer to me is a sacred time that comes around for only a few short months each year. I find myself needing to savor every moment of it with my family. Not like this is the only time I ever get to spend with them, but if our winter months this year pan out like last year, we will all be sick half of the time and fun frolicking will be limited, so I am trying to do as much of it as I can now. Not to mention there are so many more magnificent activities in the summer; the pool, the beach, the farmers markets, the fairs, and any other awesomely awesome event I just HAVE to go to. 

So you see, with all of this planning and fun having something ends up teetering off balance and I find myself overwhelmed and exhausted some days. I am sure this is not just a working mom thing but darn it if I didn’t wish I had a few extra hours in the day to get stuff done. 

I’ve been swamped at work for the most part lately, and I have been trying to apply/ interview for other jobs which is a job in and of itself. I also have a household to haphazardly run (let’s face it, I will never have a clean, organized living space) and then the most important of all, spending time with my Emma! I also try to blog a little bit too, but you can tell from my 5 posts in the last month that that has been taking a back seat as well. This weekend the household ball which I have been letting hover dangerously close to the ground, finally came crashing down. I came to the realization that there would be no real salvaging the housework when I washed our beach towels that had sand and salt water on them from last weekend (yes they had been sitting in a wet lump on the floor for a week) only to use them at the pool the next day and notice that they are back in their wet lump state waiting anxiously for the day when they can be clean and dry for more than 24 hours. 

It didn’t help that our dryer stopped functioning again. We have had a love hate relationship with our dryer for the last few months, in which when it works we love it and when it doesn’t we hate it. I spend every weekend holding my breath wondering if this would be the final load. Well, this weekend it happened again, I was finally getting around to washing our sand encrusted clothes from the last weekend’s beach trip and the dryer conked out with approximately 4.5 loads of laundry left to go. Grand! So I am now going to be further behind than I was before and we still have clothes from two weeks ago that are “ocean fresh.” The rest of the house has been hanging on by a thread as well. 

                        Here would be the aftermath of the dryer breaking. We got "creative."

But, to be honest, we have had a blast out and about adventuring every weekend and I have loved every minute of it and we really have no intention of slowing down (although I am looking forward to planning at least one weekend with minimal outings.)  The other new development is that I find now more than before that after an outing which lasts just a few hours, I am exhausted, to the point of not being able to function or get anything else done. On Saturday this past weekend, we went to the pool for about 2.5 hours or so and afterward, forget it I could barely move off the couch. Same thing happened on Sunday after 4 hours at the zoo. I had to just relax on the couch when we got home. Luckily, both times Emma was happy to engage in free play while I rested. I am sure part of my exhaustion has to do with spending the entire time on both outings running after an energy filled toddler. Either way, the household chores ball doesn’t look like it will be put back into regular juggling rotation for a while and the fun seeker in me is ok with that.

Happy Summer Everyone! What has your family been up to? How do you manage to juggle everything in your day?