What Gives?

This is not a new story.  And if you cannot see some of yourself in it PLEASE at least help me be more like you!!  Like any human who has reached adulthood and acquired some level of responsibility, I cannot figure out how to do everything in a day that I need/want to do.  I can't fit it into a week or a year either!  So what gives?  What do I give up? 

You hear all the time, "Your children are the most important thing, they will be gone before you know it".  Yes!  This is so true.  And so I try to do puzzles in the evening on the dining room table, and attend their games and get them to their overlapping practices and read them books at night and have dance parties and tickle fights and I am still responsible for flossing their teeth (or paying the price later).  This list goes on.  And I love this!!  They being me smiles and laughter and arguments and dirty laundry..oh wait I digress.

But if I do in fact let all else go, won't I loose myself or worse my mind?  I mean if I truly forget cleaning will I even be able to stand the place, and let's face it..would any of you really visit?  How many of you have heard that "When your children are young the house will never be clean"  Have you seen an episode of Hoarders? Perhaps they are simply people who never recovered from the kid years?!

I want so many things for my children.  I think that part is coming along nicely.  And, I also want things for me.  Some big, some small.  I want to have a reasonably clean house where the laundry is close to done and the dishes are not falling out of the sink,  I want to do my job well, I want to spend time with family and friends, I want to write, I want to exercise (let's face it that one cannot wait til my kids are grown), I want to travel, I want to run,  I want to finish painting my TV room and fill my home with creative decor, I want to plant flowers and get rid of the intrusive briers in my irises...I want to do it all.  And since I must sleep, something has to give. 

It doesn't have to give for always, but in each day all of this cannot happen. And so I spin my gerbil wheel racing to fit many of them in, cutting this out today and that out tomorrow.  I am surrounded by laundry as I write and I have a young one coming down the stairs with a book and I have an exercise class in an hour.  Then it is off to work..and lacrosse...and the school play... 

Perhaps I could count the gerbil wheel as exercise, that would free up time to...

Join me!  I would love to hear what spins your gerbil wheel.