Rules Should Be Broken, At Least in Summer

by | Jul 30, 2019 | Parenting

What rules do you break/bend in the summer? 

Does your life have a different flow in the different seasons? 

Or do you just stay constantly busy?

I truly believe that schedules have to be more flexible in the summer.  At least if you don’t live near the equator and you get some daylight shift throughout the year.

I totally broke a rule yesterday.  The kids had been begging me to take them to our local spring fed pond for some swimming and cooling down from all the heat.  And I was going to do it, until I came downstairs and saw the absolute mess. That no one had done anything about cleaning up.  And then I was like, no we can’t go to the pond if this is how you treat the house. It’s just not a possibility.

So my kids were completely pissed off and stomped around while actually doing their chores.  I complained on social media while counting down the days until their father gets back so he could be the  “Mean One” to go back to Mr. Grinch

I folded laundry so that I could say I was contributing and the littles and I picked out different songs to play.  My eldest started water for pasta while washing and drying each dish.

After dinner I broke my rule and said let’s go for a fast trip to the pond.  The girls put all the animals to bed and we drove the 7 minutes to the pond. We were there only about 15 minutes, because the water was starting to get really cold, I had goosebumps on my arms and legs, but it was really nice to cool down and they got a chance to burn off some of their energy and anger.  We came home, and I returned a phone call and they watched one show and then it was off to bed. With new audio books and hopefully a slightly better mood.  

 

This would be harder to do if we had someplace we had to be the next day.  Which does happen even in summer. Last week I had three days in a row where I had to get up at like 5:30 and it just about killed me by the time we got to the third day.  

 

Other rules I break during summer:

  • Making hot meals, that often flies out the window.  I would much rather say, here have some veggies and make do than actually turn the oven or stove on.  

  • Reading practice, it has just been too hot to sit there and listen to someone struggle over their reading, not a popular one, I am sure but OMG I am only one person this summer

  • Getting up early, yep don’t care for that one this summer either, and I’m letting the almost 13 year old sleep as long as she wants in the mornings

  • Regular activities, it is really nice to not have to be schelping people to classes, programs, etc.

  • Back to back play dates, we often break these up, but as the only parent this summer I will take all the help I can get.

 

It is not all bad.  We have been listening to some shared audio books on drives, including some nonfiction ones.  It is nice to know I am staying home all day except maybe a trip to the pond and not having to put a bra on.  Or even really get that dressed. It was hilarious watching my older two getting into a pillow fight yesterday while their dad giggled from India since we were on a video chat.

What rules do you break/bend in the summer?  Does your life have a different flow in the different seasons?  Or do you just stay constantly busy?

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Murphy’s Law

by | Jul 16, 2019 | Parenting

Lately I have felt like everything that can go wrong or break, has. 

Let me fill you in on what has been going on around here lately.

When I said yes to my husband going to India for work for 70 days I was not aware of this particular brand of Murphy’s Law that would come to visit us.  I might have changed my answer if I had known. Probably not, because I am stubborn, but I might have.

Lately I have felt like everything that can go wrong or break, has.  Let me fill you in on what has been going on around here lately.

Our 200 + pound pig who is waiting until this fall to be dispatched to the freezer (because we harvest our own meat rather than spending the money on someone else doing it) decided that she was super bored after being the only pig for not even 3 months.  The other pig had literally picked her up and moved her around by his nose so we thought her life would be better by putting him in the freezer first. And it was until she got Bored.  One of the first Mondays my hubby was gone we had the pig escape not once, not twice, but about four times from a pen that she had otherwise never gotten out of.  And we kept shoring up the sides of the fence, adding an additional fence post, giving her food to lull her back into the fence until finally I used the jet spray on the hose and used it on her nose to herd her back into her pen where we finally shored it up enough.  

Then I bought her a bale of hay and that has kept her busy.  I actually bought her two and now not quite a month later we keep giving her new bits so she has something new to play with and a new nest to build in her 3 sided house.  It’s three sided because she took the other two sides off.

We have also randomly lost one of the meat turkeys while friends were visiting and we woke up one morning to a dead duck for no apparent reason.  Homestead life.

The very first time I used our John Deere to mow our 2 acre rolling lawn, when I was almost done with the bit farthest from the house the belt that runs the mower portion broke.  So we had to order a new belt and then I had to figure out how to replace it because we don’t have a pickup truck so there wasn’t anyway to transport the riding mower to a place that might do it for me.  I spent the 3rd and 4th of July fixing the belt. And in the end it was hubby looking at photographs of the belt woven into all the wheels that caught the mistake I had made in the weaving. It still took a fair bit of muscle, lying on the ground and swearing to get it to work.

Victory right?  Wrong. Because I was able to get about half the lawn mowed stopping every 20 minutes because the rear back tire would go flat because of it’s “slow leak”.  That got so bad that I gave up mowing and we looked into getting Slime to fix the tire long enough until hubby got back home in about 40 days and he could fix it himself.

I left the mower for a few days because I was frankly sick of it.  I tried again last evening because we had a cooler day where it wasn’t raining.  I put the Slime in following the directions and pumped the tire as full as I could get it.  And drove the tractor own the hill to the part of the yard I hadn’t mowed yet and then it stopped moving.  Because the tire had come completely off the rim. The tractor is still sitting out there while hubby and I research the next steps on fixing that.

I am hosting a Harry Potter themed party next week and we may just have to play Quidditch in tall grass, if anyone wants to play make your own Quidditch game.

Also I have been paying my girls in ice cream drumsticks or sandwiches to do extra chores.  You know like clean up the yard, clean out the van, mop the kitchen floor that kind of thing.  When I first asked them to vacuum they turned it on and got a rubbery smell. I was in the middle of something else so asked them to stop and came up with something else for them to do.  The vacuum sat for a couple of weeks while I dealt with the mower and other things and I fixed it yesterday. Turned out to be a squirrel sized pile of hair and yarn and crap wound around the brushes.  So the stairs finally got vacuumed yesterday.

There is something going on with our passenger side sliding door on the van.  I don’t know what it is but it feels like it is getting caught on something and really doesn’t want to close.  I have done minimal diagnosing and have gotten the door shut and have banned anyone from opening it. I haven’t even told hubby about it yet because he will just research the heck out of it and I am fine with just not using it and having it wait until he gets home to deal with it.  If he starts sending me how to fix it stuff I will end up having a go and I really don’t want to.

I still haven’t found the small vacuum and vacuumed out the lint trap in the dryer that he told me that needed to be done as he was driving to the bus station to go to the airport for his trip.  So we are drying everything on the clothesline and I am trying to feel good about lessening my carbon footprint.

Then there is the fact that if anyone poops in the upstairs bathroom it doesn’t want to flush down well.  I am literally sick of using the plunger and smelling shit upstairs. I have tried to ban poops upstairs but inevitably someone forgets every few days.

We have had a stray kitten show up and decide to live with us.  She gets fixed next week but in the meantime she hasn’t always been 100% on the litter box usage, she has caused the cat food consumption to be way higher than what two cats were like and she went into heat last week and we did our best to keep her inside.  With two other indoor/outdoor cats and a 5 year old that was not a full proof plan. Hopefully she didn’t get pregnant because that will make her spaying bill a bit higher.

We have also lost power twice since hubby has left, and that had only happened like twice before in the year we have lived in this house.  Last time we lost power it was for so long we ended up sleeping at a friends house and I thought about trying to figure out how to use the generator I have never used.  It came on before I got the nerve up to try it. But the next day we thought the washer was broken for awhile before I figured out it was just the plug that got fried during the power outage.  Rerouted the washer to another plug and now it works just fine.

Also my kids are slobs and don’t want to do their daily chores so my house looks worse than normal and I am hosting a party that the kids wanted to do in less than a week.  I hope they enjoy cleaning shit up because I am not doing this all by myself. It’s not all my mess. I mean some of it is, but most of it is theirs.

So yeah.  Can we put a moratorium on anything else breaking until say August 19th when hubby will have been home for a few days and might have caught up on some sleep?  Please?  I am handy but I am tired of having to deal with all of this alone, and be the muscle and have someone who is much better fixing it trying to give me directions from across the world.  

Maybe I am just tired.  That could be it too.

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

I Really Don’t Know How They Do It

by | Jul 9, 2019 | Parenting

I don’t know how single mom’s do it.  Or military families. Or long distance truckers or anyone really.

Today is day 35.  We are at the halfway point, and hubby comes home in 35 days.  It is supposed to get downhill from here. However, the way the girls are acting it feels like it might be uphill.

I don’t know how single mom’s do it.  Or military families. Or long distance truckers or anyone really.

Today is day 35.  We are at the halfway point, and hubby comes home in 35 days.  It is supposed to get downhill from here. However, the way the girls are acting it feels like it might be uphill.

Mercury is in Retrograde which might explain why the communication I am having with the girls and they are having with each other is fucked up, to say the least.  And as the only parent at home, I am getting really tired of it. I am afraid after a while my patience wears thin for the ugly crying about things I can’t fix or that they just don’t want me to fix.

I am tired of being the parent that has to uphold the chores, and bedtime (especially in the summer when bedtime feels so wiggly anyway).  I have been getting them together with other kids regularly this week.   

I am so tired of telling the 5-year-old to put the kitten that decided to show up and move in with us down and to stop moving her around.  The kitten doesn’t seem to know any better and just puts up with it most of the time. She is also smaller than the other two cats but still manages to win the fights with the crotchety older cat over who gets to sleep on my bed.  I’d rather the older cat win because she can open the door when she wants to leave and the kitten can’t and I am tired of the light from the hall coming into my room.

And as I am writing this all four of my daughters have landed on my bed.  One is in a puddle of tears because I asked her to do a chore before tv. One is playing on my phone, the other two are just hanging around not helping and stirring the crying one up.  

To say it is hard to think straight is an understatement.  To say that because this is what the last 24 hours have been like I don’t want to do anything fun with them now because the only break I have gotten I slept through feels like a guilty confession.  And a failure and just the never ending nature of being the only adult around right now.

We spent the day at a friends house.  I kept my friend company while she did some sorting and the kids played with her son.  They appeared to be having a good time at the time but it has been a constant meltdown of someone since we got back.  So I am guessing that they need to stay home for a few days. Maybe I should lock them all outside? That’s what happened the last time I left for the day they managed to lock themselves out of the house.  

I am trying to come up with the good bits.  The girls have gotten tired of pizza which they don’t normally get to eat that much of as their dad is allergic to cow’s milk and the alternatives get more expensive.  I am tired of cooking. I had gotten used to hubby cooking 4-5 dinners a week and cooking for food that I know he and I will enjoy and now I am cooking for the picky horde of hormonal monsters.

Yes, I am not taking that line back because that is what they have felt like lately.  We don’t have that quiet Dad testosterone to calm them down, give them another lap to sit on or the occasional raised voice to get them back in line.  

Good bits, none of the animals have been too much trouble this week, the pig seems willing to stay in her pen as long as we keep her in fresh hay to play with.  The gander keeps taking himself on walks but is staying in the yard so that works. The kitten gets fixed in two weeks so she should settle down at that point. Blueberries are starting to come in.  

Also, I will hopefully not be doing another 10 weeks alone any time soon.  While I know hubby may need to go back at some point, hopefully, it will be for shorter periods or maybe next time we can come and visit him at the end of it.  We already have our passports after all.

Hopefully the crying winds down today.  I have stuff I need to do and dealing with all that crying as an empath can sap a lot of my energy.  Especially when they are my kids. It can be so much harder to ignore. But sometimes that is what you have to do.  That and triage. Maybe I was a nurse in a former life? Because I feel like a lot of my day is spent triaging, both the kids and what I need to get done for that day.

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.