I had a realization this morning as I swept the floor for what felt like the 10,000th time in one day- my entire life centers on maintaining homeostasis.

Ok before you roll your eyes and say, “obviously, that’s what everyone’s life focuses on!” let me explain.

There’s a certain level of mess, chaos, laundry, “work work”, and just life that needs to be maintained to run a house, have a part time job, and keep three kids alive.  There’s just stuff to do all the freaking live long day. Seriously if you think you are bored please come help me. You have to stay on the stuff or it just spirals out of control. Take my laundry room for instance. I haven’t folded laundry since before we went on vacation last week, I’ve washed it but not folded it. It’s out of control. It looks like the upside down is taking over my house, it’s spreading from the laundry room to other areas of the house. Oh and because I haven’t folded clothes, I also haven’t put clothes away… Which means my kids have been rifling through their drawers looking for their favorite shirts, socks, underwear (which are sitting clean in a basket in the laundry room) and throwing everything else out in the process, it’s a vicious cycle. This is what I mean about maintaining homeostasis. Once a week I go through (you know on a week without back to back vacations) and fold and put away the clothes. The mess is always there, but it’s localized to the laundry room, it doesn’t spread to all the other sections of our house.

I spend so much time trying to maintain the status quo that we never actually move forward, or it doesn’t feel like we move forward. A month ago I meant to clean out all the winter clothes and put them in the closet, now it’s june and they are still in the closet and I’m just gonna give you big fat heads up, they’re going to stay there until next june when they’re too small.

I have high hopes of getting everything done and getting ahead, but on the off chance I have a night off (like this one that I’ve created by NOT doing the laundry) I either spend it working, sometimes writing though that is pretty rare, or my personal favorite… Going to bed at 9pm.

This is what life with littles is like folks. It isn’t bad, it’s just busy. Don’t worry I’m not having a pity party, I’m just the kind of person that wants you to know the glass is a little bit less full and you might need to head on over to the store for a refill sooner rather than later.  No I haven’t read the latest book, finished a podcast from this year, or gotten a pedicure (though in fairness I hate pedicures), but I’ve swept the floor for the 9 millionth time today, started yet another load of laundry, and added to my ever present grocery list.

My sweet next door neighbor recently hinted that in order to stay on top of the Georgia weeds I might want to use RoundUp as the weeds were coming up instead of waiting until after they become bushes. I almost laughed out loud. He was being helpful, but here’s the deal, he’s a single retired guy nearing 75 who literally has the entire day to worry about weeds in his yard. He can spot a tiny weed and crush it before it gets big, me- I need the weed to be as big as one of my kids before I can get to it.

And it isn’t that I’m just sitting around all day. Let’s take a quick detour and talk about sitting… Wow sitting… Yeah that would be nice, but let’s get back on track you only have so much time to read this and I only have so much time to write this. I feel like I’m making the most of my time (well most of the time). I’m even using fringe hours people! Do you know how much I hate waking up early or going to bed late? Oh heavens so much! But I need more time in the day. Maybe I need less stuff in the day, but remember homeostasis? I kid you not, but the time I feed the kids, get them dressed, and clean out the dishwasher it’s almost time to eat again… Yeah.

So I’m curious what the solution is? I’m tempted to say the solution is to just wait, to maintain homeostasis as best I can today, and make the assumption (however incorrect) that tomorrow will be a little bit easier (like an imperceptible amount) and that 5 years from now I won’t even recognize where we’ve been. If that’s not reality don’t tell me, I prefer my rose colored lies.