Change is... Change

For the past year or so I feel like I've developed certain skills, such as nursing two babies simultaneously, cooking and shopping for baby purees, Spanglishing instructions to a nanny/housekeeper nearly every morning, and I built a complex set of routines around these skills and tasks: Costco Tuesday mornings during Joy School, physical therapy Friday afternoons, documenting my family's weekly activities Sunday afternoons...

I can't keep up with them anymore!

But something I've learned about mothering is that just when I get into a little bit of a comfortable routine, everything changes. Usually I don't quite even feel comfortable, it's just that all of a sudden everything gets really hard and I begin to scratch my head and then realize, oop... about twelve key things changed all at once: between all my kids' developmental stages and Ian's and my life there's a lot of change permutations in there.
Lately it feels like a lot has changed: nap schedules, nanny schedules, diet schedules, my schedule, and the skills I once had, like nursing and baby purees are obsolete and now I need to figure out how to get baby Christian to eat something besides cookies (he's got a hound nose for sweets), my kids to 12 o'clock church without an entire family meltdown, what to do with 3 year olds who are awake all day, how to channel Caleb's obsession with pouring water everywhere into something non-destructive, and how to find time to teach my kids how to hold pens and cut and do all the things they keep asking me about...
Obsolete are many of the skills I painstakingly perfected last year. My career field looks very different and I'm in need of some job retraining. Fast. Elizabeth Gilbert said "I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsoltee, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required..." I wish somebody could write a Dummy's Guide to growing gills and wings as a mom.
I've been taking a lot of deep breaths lately.


They're all over the place now.

I think that life is constantly changing, and no more so than life with little children. I'm finding myself in a real gap between trains right now, trying to get into a new rhythm with my new tasks. Perceptive as ever to my struggles Ian got me a very sweet Valentine's Book- "How to Organize Everything". I've decided to try to take the opportunity of job retraining to really look at the way that I do things around here- everything from how I organize my toys to exercising to working from home and see if I can't come up with a system that doesn't need a spatula to scrape me off the floor at the end of the day.
Otherwise, when people ask my how I do it, I want to tell them that I've figured out how to go to the bathroom only twice a day.
If only.