Routines

As I've written before, the best (only?) way to keep your sanity while taking care of a child (or children) while working at home is to get organized. We're not really organized, but we're getting there. My goal is to have everything that needs to be done captured on a list, on a calendar, or in a routine (a personal variation on David Allen's program for getting things done). For example, my life has improved vastly since I instituted a morning routine for the Critter and me:

• Wake up
• Shower and dress, or, if I'll be going for a run, put on my running clothing
• Change the Critter's diaper
• Make the bed
• Make and eat breakfast
• Wash up the Critter and get him dressed (after breakfast, because he feeds himself oatmeal—messy!)
• Clear off the table and brush my teeth
• Get outside!

Nothing mysterious here, but I've found that if we do everything in the same order every day (with a variation for the two mornings each week when the Critter goes to day care), the rest of the day goes so much more smoothly. And now that we've integrated that routine into our days, I'm working on adding a couple more weekly routines: having a "budget-and-calendar" meeting with Beckett on Sunday evenings and doing our weekly grocery shopping on Thursday afternoons. Why Thursday afternoons? Because we will we receiving our first CSA half-share next Wednesday afternoon, and so for the next twenty weeks I will be planning our weekly menus on Wednesday evenings, based on the contents of our half-share. Next Wednesday I'll also be teaching my first class in a decade. I'm terrified ... but not a little thrilled, too....

My To-Do List

Lately I've had Ogden Nash on my mind, specifically his poem "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man," which hit me like a kick to the gut the first time I heard it, probably on WNYC. In the poem, Nash compares the sins of omission with the sins of commission and concludes that if you are going to sin, at least to "remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing." After all, "you never get any fun / Out of things you haven't done ..."

Indeed not. Alas, mine are the sins of omission, of procrastination, of the 4-page-long to-do list that includes things I have failed to do (or to let go of) for weeks, months, even a year or longer. Mine are the sins of the still-unwritten thank-you notes, the stacks of paper on my desk, the neatly folded shower curtain on top of my bureau (why?), the old computer equipment in a closet (including a Mac PowerBook Duo and its dock; again, why?), the boxes of clothing and gently used items for the Salvation Army piled in a corner of the bedroom, the other boxes of who-knows-what in the living room, the fans gathering dust in another corner of the living room ...

The situation has improved much since the Critter was born, at which time the nursery was still more or less a storage room for miscellaneous items and the surface of my desk was not to be found. And yet I still find myself thinking and thinking and thinking about what remains to be done. It's shitbird thinking, and it's tricky to withstand. On the one hand, I have to take care of these things. On the other hand, I must not treat the necessity of taking care of these things as an obstacle in itself. For example, while I have to get my desk clean (and then keep it clean), in the meantime I have to keep writing anyway. I must not tell myself, desk too cluttered, can't write. I must not sit there thinking and thinking and thinking about the cluttered desk during the time I should be writing. Thinking about the desk doesn't get it clean, and it doesn't get any poems written!