The List

My finest moment of today: at the grocery store today buying a cart full of stuff, with my children on HIGH WHINE intensity mode, and looking like a thoroughly disheveled, harassed mommy with way too much on her plate- while the checker gave me a really strange look as she scanned my box of ovulation predictor kits- clearly thinking, why in the world would this woman want any MORE offspring when she can't handle the ones she has!! [bizarrely, I DO, in such a deep and sincere way it really defies understanding]

I find it somewhat funny/interesting/one of those weird things about getting OLD that I can remember very clearly as a younger person- teenage, young 20s type- feeling like as I grew, my capacity to DO more and BE more and JUGGLE more seemed to increase. I used to be able to handle my life... and now I don't know if it's because I'm into a new decade now... or because my list is just longer, or because I'm a mom now... but I seem to be losing even the abilities I once had!

Or maybe I just have too many expectations of myself as a finite human being. Here is the list I had for myself for today, in no particular order.
1. get up by 5:30am
2. finish up about 8 bow orders (of the 22 I currently had pending as of this morning!)
3. run giveaway on my blog/facebook page
4. answer every email anyone sends me within about 5 minutes
5. be a super great friend and spend time at the park with my playgroup, really listening to my girlfriends, investing in their lives, and of course playing spontaneously with my children.
6. bake cookies, draw pretty pictures, and make a super great supper for my husband and the best dad in the world for my girls (because this ungrateful wretch failed to do all of those things yesterday)
7. take my stuff to the post office in the middle of the afternoon by 5pm for fear some of said bow orders won't arrive in lightning speed.
8. go to the fabric store, the fruit stand, and Hobby Lobby
9. make about 900 phone calls I've been ignoring for weeks
10. GROCERY SHOPPING because we are out of milk and any sort of raw ingredients to cook anything except plain chicken and the children are asking for fruit and all i have to give them is potato chips!
11. send free stuff to photographers and friends because i love to give my stuff away and i like people to like me...
12. clean the house
13. do the laundry
14. look presentable when my husband gets home...
15. oh yeah, and blog something really awesome.

And I think there might have been even more to the list... looking at it kind of makes me laugh because this VERY SERIOUSLY was what I had hoped to accomplish today. And seeing all that right there in black and white makes me kind of feel silly because there is no way I could have done ALL that, even if I could have cloned myself five times over. And yet, I spent a considerable amount of the day today with a high-strung, stressed out, gloomy sort of attitude because I could feel myself failing to live up to my expectations... and rather than start to question whether the expectations were reasonable... I just felt like a loser for not being able to do it all- or even HALF of it!

I just cannot do it all... now if I could just figure out how to stop trying so darned hard!