29 hours crammed into 24

I just blogged about this on my family blog but I thought some of you parents out there might relate to my lightbulb moment.

I was fretting about being constantly behind and constantly frantic and running everywhere, with no downtime whatsoever. So I decided to sit down and do a "time budget", like a money budget but with my God-given 24 hours per day.

This is what my current inventory looked like:

• Getting myself ready each morning-30 minutes (on a good day)
• Getting all three kids up, dressed, fed, hair and teeth brushed, in the car and out the door-60 minutes, again on a good day
• Eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and 2 snacks- 15+15+30+5+5=70 minutes
• Making lunch for the three kids-30 minutes
• Cleaning up, in general- 2 hours total
• Work- let's go with a low average of 6 hours
• Stopping to get Maddy milk and turn on Elmo-2 minutes x 10 a day= 20 minutes
• Stopping to answer a question for Gabby (like, "why does God make toilets?")- 1 minute x 50 a day= 50 minutes. I am not exxaggerating here whatsoever--life with a 5 yr old.
• Stopping to break up an argument- 1 minute x 15 a day= 15 minutes
• Running errands and/or driving to baseball practice/games= 1 hour (add 2 more hours for game day)
• laundry=45 minutes a day minimum
• Shower and wash/straighten hair-90 minutes on a straightening day, 45 if not
• workout=60-80 minutes
• take kids out on outing/play with kids= 2 hours minimum
• baths for kids, bedtime routine=60 minutes
• blogging/twittering= 15 minutes
• And while my husband works these crazy hours, add making dinner and doing dishes too=60 minutes.

OK at this point, I haven't slept yet and I'm up to 29 hours. No wonder it feels like there are never enough hours in the day...there literally aren't!

So now I'm evaluating my list to see what can be done about whittling down to a do-able 15-18 hours :)

The upside to creating this list? I don't feel so guilty now for not being able to get it all done!!!!!