My first alarm goes off at 6 AM. I roll over and nurse the baby one last time while he's still mostly asleep. My next alarm goes off at 6:30, and at that point I'm actually supposed to get out of bed. If I'm lucky, I can sneak away while he's still asleep; if I'm not, either I stay in bed a little longer or he wakes up with me, which makes the whole morning routine a bit more difficult. I take the dog out and feed him, then make some coffee and check my phone for emails and Facebook messages and whatnot. I need that time to wake my brain up.
By 7 AM, it's time to wake up my Big Guy to start getting ready for school. He, like his mother, also has ADHD (or at least, we strongly suspect it and have just started the process of getting him diagnosed), so mornings are very challenging for both of us. I drag him out of bed and try to get him to choose what he wants for breakfast, and eventually he eats but that takes at least half an hour. So around 7:30, we begin the fight to get him to pick out clothes and get dressed, which has gotten even harder lately because he's not liking school anymore. He's been going to a really nice Montessori school for the last year and a half, but this year, he has a new teacher who is much more strict and less loving than last year's teacher, so he's really struggling and not enjoying it. At least that makes it a little bit less painful that we now have to transfer him into a public pre-K program because of my pay cut. But in the meantime, he still hates school and doesn't want to go, so therefore he doesn't cooperate with getting dressed, so I have to assist every step of the way and delay getting myself ready until he leaves with his dad at 8:20.
At that point I can get into the shower and start getting myself ready. But of course, I'm still not just getting myself ready, I have to get the baby ready. That means washing bottle and pump parts if hubby hasn't done it the night before, which he was getting into a good habit of helping with while I put the kids to bed, but then he got sick last week and he hasn't helped since. I also use cloth diapers, for more cost savings, so I wash them the night before and put them in the dryer first thing in the morning, so by this time they're dry, and I need to pack the diaper bag, prepare bottles with the milk I pumped yesterday, and pack up everything I need to pump at work today.
So some days, like today, I get out the door around 10 AM. That's a 4 hour morning routine, mind you. So I drop the baby off, get to work around 11, work for an hour or so, then take a half hour lunch and pumping break. I'm lucky that I only have to pump once a day to make nearly enough milk for Little Bit to drink the next day, and I've got a nice freezer stash saved up from when I was way over-producing early on. I get back to work for a few more hours and leave between 4 and 4:30.
The commute home usually takes longer than the commute in, so I pick the boys up between 5:30 and 6. We get home, and I start cooking dinner. If we're lucky I have dinner on the table by 6:30 or 7, we eat, and it's time to start the bedtime routine for Big Guy immediately after cleaning up from dinner. He only gets a bath if we get to the bedtime routine before 7 PM, and you don't want to know how rare that is. In theory, it's lights out and I come upstairs by 8 PM, but sometimes that's as late as 9 PM. I change the baby for bed, nurse him to sleep, and crash myself pretty much immediately. Yes, I need a lot of sleep...8 to 9 hours, 10 would be nice...I've never been one who can get away with less sleep.
So hopefully you can see how the whole day is filled with just getting ready for work, school, and day care, being at work, school, and day care, and getting ready for bed and the next day. Weekends are a little bit less rush rush rush, but there's still constantly stuff to do. There's no time during the week to do the little maintenance cleaning tasks that would make keeping the household in order more of a doable feat, so the weekends are spent on laundry and cleaning and dishes and going through the mail and whatever...all the usual household crap just fills up all the time.
Once in a while, I try to reach out and make friends, but then I don't have time to spend with them and maintain and build a friendship, so they tend to fizzle out except for on Facebook, like all my long-distance friendships. I'd like to go to church on Sundays, and some weeks that happens, some weeks it doesn't. I'd love to have time for volunteering and stuff like that...that was always a value that was instilled in me growing up, but there's just no time for anything. No hobbies...I used to like to knit, and I was working on a baby blanket for Big Guy when I was pregnant with him, but it's still only about 2 feet long. I am determined to eventually catch up to how tall he is, like by the time he goes away to college, and send it with him. Little Bit will be lucky if he gets a piece of fleece fabric cut directly off of the fabric store bolt and not even hemmed at the edges.
I don't know what else to say. I'm feeling very defeated lately. Maybe I can try to come up with a way to make this more productive... Does anyone know of any opportunities for part time data analysis work from home? I am a good Matlab programmer, and I'm sure I could figure out any other kind of coding people wanted. I'd really like to get into a different field where I know they must need specialized data analysts. I don't want to be the PI of the lab or anything. The field I had in mind also has a closer relevance to clinical work, which appeals to me in some ways, but I'm afraid I would need to do another postdoc to get the skills needed to do that work even though it is closely related to what I'm currently doing. Maybe I could get away with applying directly for a job doing that kind of analysis?
Oh I forgot to mention earlier, one of the reasons the morning routine gets so stretched out, aside from dealing with ADHD me and ADHD Big Guy, is nursing the baby. Little Bit likes to decide it's time to nurse while I'm in the middle of getting ready, and then fall asleep and stay latched on for like an hour. If I was ready, I would just take him to daycare and let her give him a bottle, but I can't just let him cry. I could unlatch him after 10 minutes or after he falls sleep or whatever, but I'm a sucker for a sleep-nursing baby, and I don't believe in rushing him.
I just feel like I should be able to do this...I should be able to take care of my family's needs, my personal needs to maintain my sanity...because I am getting depressed over this. I feel like I'm kind of stuck. How am I supposed to find a new job when I don't have a second of spare time to spend on looking for one? Yeah, maybe I can look for jobs on my phone while I'm nursing the baby, but that's not exactly conducive to actually preparing a good targeted cover letter and resume.
...I babbled on for a while after this, but it got repetitive, and I got sick of editing it. So, here you go. I wrote this a week or more ago, but I'm posting as it is, to capture the feelings then, even though they've evolved some in the meantime.
