Here goes nothing! My Life & Times.: March 2015

So. I skipped the entire month of February. Not because I had nothing to write but because I had no time to write it. In fact, I could think of a dozen things I could write but here I am. More than halfway through March with not a single sentence written. I have no time.

Jared went back for his master's degree and since then our life has been barely livable. Jared gets up at the crack of dawn, goes to work, goes to school, goes back to work, comes home, eats dinner, helps put kids to bed, does homework, and then goes to bed late at night long after I've already gone to sleep. Over and over again. There is no time for anything else.

With Jared out of the picture, I am the sole laundry, housekeeping, childcare, and food provider. I do this all while waking up multiple times a night with one or more kids. It's hard. It's really hard. I had gotten into a good pattern of getting things done, but that went out the window when I had to figure out how to do that stuff on my own to give Jared time to do homework and get in his fulltime work week and his full time class schedule.

William has started crawling, so all choking hazards have been banished to the basement. The baby gate at the top of the steps is back up. He has 4 teeth fully in and he's working on more. We started feeding him solid foods, which he thus far hates.

Oliver has lost his first two baby teeth and he's starting to learn to read. Colin started preschool one day a week and loves it, but I'll be damned if it isn't the hardest part of my week just getting him out the door to go to school each Friday.

There is so much going on, and I am spread way too thinly. I'm not under any delusions. I know that, like every single other person in the entire world, I'm not capable of everything. I can't do everything. I am okay with that, and I really do understand that more than anything...

...But at the same time, what else can I do? What choice do I have but to continue trying to do everything right now? I just have to suck it up and make it through until summer when Jared can help out more. I hate being so busy. So busy that I feel like I'm not even here for any of this. One day I realized that William is steadily sitting up on his own, but then when I looked back at pictures, I realized he's doing it for weeks and I'm just now noticing. Somehow Colin has begun speaking in more or less complete grammatical sentences and it didn't even occur to me until I showed up for his speech assessment and really, truly listened to him talking for the first time in a long time.

The biggest thing that I miss is having people here to interact with. I've joined a local mom's group and I attend weekly mommy & me classes, but without any free time, what chance do I have at making friends? The friends that I do have aren't local. My parents are two time zones away. Most of my & Jared's families are far away. I feel like I haven't even spent any time with Jared since Christmas, despite living in the same house and sleeping in the same bed each night. Being alone is hard.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Or if I am, I'm at least not forgetting all of the things I'm grateful for. I'm happy that Jared has this opportunity to go back to school for free. I'm happy that Bill is growing and learning and changing. I'm happy that we are healthy and that we have food and clothes and the means to take our kids out to the zoo and the mall and all the other places we go. I have a million things that I am grateful for.

But still. I am exhausted and lonely. Summer can't come soon enough.