Manic Monday

As I sit at my desk this afternoon and reflect back on just what this morning has held for me I realize how much I have done. I woke up slightly before the baby and made myself a cup of tea. Fed breakfast to the baby, then bundled her up, laced up my running shoes, and took off for a short run. We returned, she played a little before settling in for her nap. I then showered, ate, crocheted a little bit, and am now writing this post. That's a lot of variety (though not much depth into each activity) but it got me back to thinking about the priorities I have now as a stay and work at home mom.

The house needs to be kept stocked, cleaned and presentable.
My daughter needs to be kept fed, cleaned, presentable, and engaged in meaningful activities.
I need to be kept fed, cleaned, presentable, and ideally filled with a feeling of accomplishment without feeling overwhelmed.
The cat box needs to be cleaned daily.
I need to have nutritious meals available to my family.
Ideally I need to be working on building my two businesses (I am working on the assumption that saying this will keep them in the thought rotation).

What that boils down to is: cook, clean, mother, self (wow that's a broad one), knit design and sharing the awesome doTerra essential oils.

What that tends to look like is: mother, run or yoga, maybe make progress on a baby blanket (my goal is to finish it before that baby is 6 months old), and have dinner at least planned out.

Right now my daughter is napping, so I rated the necessary activities in order of importance. Shower was first since I ran this morning, followed closely by lunch. I put on a show to watch during lunch, and since I started a second episode and it wasn't finished yet I decided to crochet on the baby blanket until that episode was over. During that time my mind was wandering thinking about this idea of priorities, leading directly to this blog post.

I generally think of my priorities in order of importance (with mothering ending up default at the top of that list, one year olds are not patient creatures). And while I have big ideas for essential oil classes, learn to knit parties, and dinner extravaganzas making those ideas come to life takes a bit more concentrated time than I have the luxury of lately. So things like run 2 miles and crochet while my daughter plays with blocks tend to take on a greater active priority. Heck, today I have been going to the dryer in the garage when we need a new diaper, because really that's not so hard.

When it comes down to the nitty gritty of my daily priorities, I would really rather not deal with them (you can ask how many loads of clean laundry I have to fold, but I will probably lie about it). Because in the end, I would rather enjoy time with my daughter than fold laundry. I would rather be able to bless friends with blankets for their new babies, than have a lovely pile of stuffed and ready cloth diapers. Heck, I'm really enjoying taking the extra five minutes to sit my daughter on a potty at diaper changes and read her a book.

So what it comes down to, I suppose, is while I can have my exciting and fun and big picture priorities laid out all nicely and logically, spending time with my daughter, doing things for others, and nurturing my soul are going to win out. And, for the most part, I am totally okay with that.

Now I'm going to go get those diapers out of the dryer :)