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By rebecca, May 15, 2012 12:31 am

Sometimes in the summer the kids and I will pick up Ed from work and then drive right across town to the east-end Beaches for dinner and a stroll on the boardwalk. We do it when it’s easier than facing the throng of late rush hour traffic heading west. I do it when I just can’t face going home quite yet. We never plan ahead; we just go.

Friday was our first time this season — and our first as a family of five. We parked near the beach and then walked up to Queen St. to get the family meal deal at Lick’s. We always go to either Lick’s or the Goof, not because we’ve sworn off other places, but just because that’s where we always want to go. So I parallel parked the car on a bend in the road and turned off the engine.

“You’re like five feet from the curb, you know.” “No I’m not! What the hell, fine.” I pull out and park again, this time carefully tucking in close to the curb. “It’s that stupid car behind me. I was lining up with him, but he’s parked out in the middle of the road.” I roll up the windows and turn off the engine again. WHRRR. WHRRR. WHRMF. What the?! “Colum!” Stop messing with your window! How many times do I have to tell you?” Ever since we moved that kid into a booster seat it’s been nonstop with the stupid window. Nobody warned me about this! So I turn on the car AGAIN and roll up all the windows and cut the engine. Again.

I pull the first Maclaren umbrella stroller ever made out of the trunk and proceed to swipe at it with my foot while kind of slamming/bouncing it off the ground. It finally pops open and Ed starts to buckle baby Mary in. “What are you doing?” I snap, “There’s no way Irene’s going to want to walk all the way up to Queen St and back this late in the day. That’s why I brought the carrier.”

We finally gather all of our people and bags and things and more people and more bags and start making our way up the street. We have to walk a block out of our way to cross safely at traffic lights and I alternate between calling out for Irene to keep away from traffic and for Colum to just get down off that ledge/fence/bench/newspaper box and stick with us.

At some point Irene did climb into the stroller and Ed wound up pushing her while I wore Mary and the gigantic diaper bag and held hands with Colum. There we were, in full-tilt parent mode, when we came across an old friend and his girlfriend enjoying a beer on a patio. These are life long, die-hard Queen St. W.-ers and I even feigned surprise at seeing them that far east. We awkwardly exchanged ‘how’ve you been’s, us jiggling and bouncing and straining against our various progeny and them trying to exhale their cigarette smoke in the other direction. “So, uh, yeah. You guys should come out some day.” “We are out!” I exclaimed. Everyone laughed and we carried on.

And, you know, encounters like that used to kill me. It’s like I was waiting for some magical time when my kid would be old enough, or my life would be organized enough, that I could pick up where I left off. Because apparently I wasn’t quite finished whiling my life away, pint after pint? But then you have another kid, and another, and you realize that life is never coming back. And suddenly that’s okay.

Because we were out! Because nestled between the never-ending whining and bickering and nagging, hidden among the chaos and the stress and the time spent doing nothing, there’s this:

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By rebecca, May 11, 2012 4:40 am

“Mommy? Is my tiara on upside down again?”

I let out a long sigh of resignation.

“No, sweetie. It’s right side up. And …

And it looks lovely.”

She skips over to the mirror to admire herself.

“I’m being a princess.”

“That’s fine, Irene. You can pretend to be a princess if you want.”

“I can? Even though you don’t like princesses alive?”

. . .

I don’t think I’m quite as radical as she thinks I am.

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By rebecca, May 8, 2012 1:31 pm

Life is a complete scramble right now. It’s not just the mad rush to cram lunch in my kids’ faces and pack Colum a snack and get everybody out the door in time to catch the school bus every single day. It’s not just the trying to get a six year old out of a wet bathing suit with a screaming baby and a three year old running laps around the change room. It’s not just juggling t-ball practices and games and two different swimming lessons  with dinner prep and dirty diapers. It’s not just getting them dressed and undressed and bathed and maybe even squeezing in time for a shower myself.

That’s just my baseline scramble. That stuff is expected.

It’s also the laundry and the dishes and the toys and the games and the snippets of paper and all the freaking STUFF that I can’t keep at bay. It’s the papers from school piling up on the kitchen counter and the dry erase calendar that’s been scribbled over. It’s the doctor’s appointments and birthday parties to attend and to throw and the countless other events and obligations I can no longer keep in my head. It’s the pantry jammed full of food stuff in no particular order despite my best intentions to keep it organized. Ditto for the fridge. And the linen closet. And all the closets and drawers, really. It’s the cleaning and weeding and planting and mulching and all kinds of other gardening-type stuff I’m still learning about.

It’s also this blog and the other writing I should be doing. In any given moment I have SO MUCH to do that I am paralyzed with indecision. If Mary’s napping for an hour what can I really get accomplished? A blog post? Maybe, if it’s crappy, and if I don’t also check in with Twitter and Facebook and G+ and Pinterest and my email and my other email. I’ll start to unload the dishwasher and then put some clothes in the dryer and then get Irene a snack and then start to pick up the toys in the living room and then quickly check my email … and somehow nothing gets done.

And that is the hardest part of parenting for me. The doing nothing. We go to the park and they play and maybe I play too or chat with another parent and, really, I’m doing nothing. It’s just so much waiting around. Waiting for swimming and t-ball and the school bus. Waiting for bedtime.

I know, intellectually, that’s it’s not doing nothing. I know that in those gaps, those moments of waiting and doing nothing, the best parts of parenting happen. Just being there, watching the t-ball game. Reading to Irene and Mary while we wait. Playing ball with the kids. Walking places! We do our best talking when we’re walking and driving places. It’s just so hard to be in that moment when I’m constantly rifling through a never-ending To Do list in my head. It feels like I’m doing nothing and I don’t have time for nothing!

I also know that this is magnified tenfold by the baby. So much of our at-home time is spent caring for an increasingly mobile and demanding baby. The half hour here, the twenty minutes there that I used to spend cleaning the kitchen, prepping dinner, folding laundry or even reading a magazine are no longer sufficient. Or, rather, I just don’t get those twenty or thirty uninterrupted minutes anymore. So what could be, should be and used to be a twenty minute job now takes an hour if it gets done at all. And then the sheer volume of chores and tasks and work to be done during naps and at night is just too much.

But babies grow up. In the blink of an eye Mary will be walking and talking and I will miss this babyhood. So this too shall pass and I shouldn’t wish it away before its time.

In the meantime, I need discipline and schedules and routines that work. I need organization. Please help a girl out. What are your best tips for organizing your time?