And I’m a little slow adapting mentally.<\/p>\n
Now Bean wakes at 6 a.m. So do I. We’re going 3 to 3.5 hours before her first nap (she won’t sleep unless she’s really tired). That puts my free time to take a shower smack at the same time Husband gets up to shower. She’s not really napping much in the afternoon anymore. Maybe a half hour to 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
Bean is mobile now, and I see how much of my daily life will now become an active vigil protecting her from hurting herself as she explores. That makes getting other tasks done a little harder.<\/p>\n
We eat dinner (but lately I haven’t even thought about dinner so we’ve been eating take-out). I’m very tired a lot of the time. By 6:30 (Husband comes home) we eat, and he has time with Bean. He puts her to bed at 8 p.m. After dinner I pick up toys, load the dishwasher, prepare the coffee maker, get out what I need for Bean’s meals the next day (bib, towel, oatmeal in a cup), make milk. Then I’m “off-duty” and it’s about 8 to 8:30. If I haven’t showered, then I have the option to do so.<\/p>\n
Then I’m so exhausted I can hardly see straight. I have about 1 to 1.5 hours of “me time” before I crash into sleep. Yet I don’t have the mental energy to concentrate on anything, so reading is difficult. The list of books on my sidebar has been there a long time; it will probably take me the whole year to read those. There’s not much of me left to enjoy at this time of day.<\/p>\n
What I’m saying is: I work a 14-hour day and have 90 minutes to myself before sleep (if I want to get a good rest to be functional next day). Husband, on the other hand, gets up at 9 a.m., goes to work at 10:00, comes home at 6:30 p.m., puts Bean to bed at 8:00, and then has time to himself. He usually stays up until 1 a.m.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t seem fair. Am I complaining? Maybe a little. I’m really tired, but not just physically. I need to somehow replenish other aspects of myself sometimes too. The office\/art room is a disaster, all horizontal surfaces covered, so I’m overwhelmed when I enter the room. Can’t even clean it up, but that must happen before I can start anything else. <\/p>\n
This is the life of a mother: long hours. A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And I’m a little slow adapting mentally. Now Bean wakes at 6 a.m. So do I. We’re going 3 to 3.5 hours before her first nap (she won’t sleep unless she’s really tired). That puts my free time to take a shower smack at the same time Husband gets up to shower. She’s not really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,16,30,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motherhood","category-nature","category-quotes","category-recreation"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2313"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13836,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions\/13836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}