Rainy Days and Mondays

Mondays are always a little hectic around here. There’s something about trying to get back into the swing of things after the weekend, I guess. We have AWANA on Sunday night, and, since we’re in charge, that takes up almost all of Sunday afternoon and evening. That, of course, means that we start Monday morning a little behind.

This Monday, however, was even more of a Monday than usual. For starters, Austin had a LOT of trouble settling down last night. I think the craziness of Sunday and Store Night at AWANA had just overstimulated him. We paced and rocked in the rocker, and finally crawled into bed around one. He ate a few hours later, and at five, I was absolutely determined NOT to get up and exercise.

I still managed to shower and be ready for the kiddos by 6:45, but by then I was regretting not exercising. As hard as it is to get out of bed and get ON the elliptical, after a couple of miles, it feels really good to get OFF. At any rate, apparently I was not the only one who was tired this morning. Getting the kids up and going was next to impossible. Even once they were up, they weren’t really going. Except Steffen, of course. He started the day with a huge blowout and seemed to have plenty of energy, particularly of the destructive two year old kind.

Plus, it was raining. I’m not complaining. It would be positively sinful to complain about the rain considering our drought. Nevertheless, the gray chilliness did not help with our motivation to get stuff done. And there’s the fact that rain keeps everyone inside. This confinement is especially hard on Justin. Boys need to have lots of room to run off their energy. Otherwise, they roll around on the floor wrestling like puppies.

As we went through the day, I had some time to reflect, and I realized that it would probably be in our best interest to switch things around in the future. (Stressful days take me back to the drawing board. What do we need to change to make things better? As far as I’m concerned, all problems can be resolved by making a list. ;-) Sometimes, when life changes, we fail to change with it. We race around doing what we’ve always done in the way we’ve always done it, and wonder why things aren’t working like they used to.

Now, I knew at the beginning of this school year that we would be having a new baby- no denying that huge belly! What I failed to take into account was that I would, for the first time, be teaching four different grades. Yes, that’s FOUR grades. That’s a lot of juggling. That means that school takes more time, and I’m going to have to account for that. I plan to come up with some strategies that will make life easier. I’ll post those here as we go along.

Yes, this rainy Monday drove me to reevaluating and list-making, but maybe I would have been better off following Austin’s lead: Fuzzy blanket and a smile.

So, why a Monday post on Saturday? Did I fail to mention that the internet and phones were out on Monday too? Just another bump in the road…