Help! I'm drowning!

There was a time when I dreamed about the day when all my children would be in school. Oh the things I would do! I would go out to lunch with my friends at places that don't have children's menus. I would slip over to the temple to do a session in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY! I would run all my errands without undoing a single carseat strap. Well the day has arrived...3 of my 4 are in school all day, and Anna has preschool twice a week. So where is all that luxury I had envisioned? That poor, pathetically naive woman who imagined this new life of ease! I wish I could find her and give her a good talking-to.

I spend every morning in a frenzy of signing planners, finding library books, sending my 6-year-old upstairs to get dressed at least 4 times, nagging, yelling, and begging my children to please just get their stuff together before they are late for school. I am a frazzled mess. Here is a verbatim quote of something I said 2 minutes before they left for school today: "That's it! I'm done telling you guys to get ready...just go to school when you feel like it! I wash my hands of the whole thing." (If I make a biblical reference, does that count as our morning scripture study?)

I then spend my days running errands, going to the gym (hey! I have to have an outlet for all this pent-up mania!), attending meetings for babysitting co-op, preschool co-op, Relief Society Presidency, helping out in 3 kids' classrooms, visiting teaching, and fulfilling other church assignments and responsibilities, taking the one child left at home to the park or the library or to play groups, and oh yeah, every once in a while attempting to do a little housework...eventually the children do need clean underwear. This week I finally decided that I just had to choose the 1 thing that I HAD to do that day because more than that was impossible. Monday was canning the peaches that are dropping out of my tree (I only am about 1/3 done). Tuesday was laundry (There are still 2 loads sitting in the laundry room) and catching up on all the back to school paperwork coming home every day (It took me literally 2 hours! 2 hours of form-filling, check-writing, and parent signatures! Can you imagine a bigger waste of time?) Wednesday was???...oh my gosh! I can't even remember what I did yesterday!

And then 4:00 comes around, the kids walk through the door and 3 seconds later, it's time for bed! Three kids in school means supervising an exponential amount of homework. Here's a little story problem for all of you math lovers. If there is 1 hour and 7 minutes between the end of the school day and your departure for child number 1's soccer game, how many minutes can be given to providing a snack for 4, helping child number 2 practice for their spelling test, listening to child number 1 read out loud (the teacher requires 20 minutes a day, but I figure if we read really fast I can cut it back to 10), helping child number 3 start their book report, listening to child number 2 and child number 3 practice the piano, finding glue and scissors for child number 2's pictograph, and making dinner to eat in the car en route to soccer game? I know it's a tricky one...you just might need to use calculus. I don't feel like I have any one child in too many extracurricular things, but the combination of schedules is burying me. Here's another fun little conondrum: Zachary has piano, scouts and flag football--that takes one afternoon, two evenings and a Saturday morning every week. Noah has the same three activities, but football is on a different night for him, and scouts is on a different afternoon. Isaac has soccer, which accounts for one weeknight practice and one weeknight game. How many days long does our week need to be to include every activity? And what do I do when Anna is old enough to be added to the after-school mix?

All right...rant over...for anyone loyal enough to have read through the math assignment, I promise to wake up with a sunnier outlook tomorrow and stop abusing my blog. Life is good. My children are all healthy. Soon they will be teenagers so I better stop and enjoy this stage of my life, frenzy and all.