4 Hours = 1 Day

Several years back, I discovered that any project that takes four hours is an "all day" project. Now you may have learned in your elementary-school math classes that there are 24 hours in a day. And you may think that 24 hours is significantly more than 4 hours. If you think that, you would be wrong. Or uninformed. OR you would be invited to use your free time to come clean floors and do errands for me. Because for a frugal homeschooling mom of several children, a 4-hour project definitely sucks up the whole day!

(Do you know that there are people who think there's nothing to do at home all day? I hear tell that there are women who think they'd be bored and have nothing to do if they stayed home with their children instead of going to a place where they are paid to work. Those are clueless women. If they need a clue, they could come play Cinderella at my house for a week or so. No, wait. I take that back. If I told such a person to go scrub a floor or bake some bread or stew a chicken or mend a sweater, that person would make such a mess of the job that it would take me longer to fix it than to have done it right in the first place myself.)

Last week I had a board meeting for the state homeschool group and was gone for 11 hours that day. An 11-hour project counts as nearly 3 days. Another day last week I was away for 11 hours, mostly working on editing projects. That's another 3 days. Wednesday was my job and church, which kept me gone for most of the day. But because I was in and out, with the chance to cook and change a load of laundry and tell children to pick up their stuff, Wednesday only counted as 1 day. Friday was dentist appointments. Two hours there equals another half-day. And then we were gone for the weekend. Because I was already so behind, and because I was leaving competent adults at home to fend for themselves, the two days did NOT count as six days out of commission (like I would normally expect), but only as three -- a half-day to prep, two days gone, and a half-day to get back to Operating Mode. So in the space of six days, I used up "eleven days" of time. No wonder I'm so out of sync.

I remember my mom telling me, back when I was a mom of toddlers, that Mom could only have one thing per day on the calendar, preferably less than that. But at that point my grandma could have only one thing per week on her calendar without getting overwhelmed. I'm beginning to learn that lesson. I'm beginning to realize that I have to watch what goes onto the calendar, realizing that two 11-hour days is going to take all my free time for a whole week. It makes me feel old. I'm beginning to learn to control what I schedule for our week. What really messes me up, though, is when other people schedule things for me (dentist appts, cardiology appts, my boss needing something done right away, etc). Next job is going to be learning to say no to the boss or to the medical receptionist.

This explains why we don't have any pictures yet from Katie and Nathan's wedding last summer. That job will take nearly a week when I get to it.

This explains why the taxes are not done yet. Although I've already done a lot of the work, it'll take nearly a week (several 4-hour stints).

This explains why I hate to let the insurance salesman come by for "just an hour." It's never just an hour, but 2 or 3. Which gets to taking nigh onto the "whole day."

This explains why fieldtrips with the homeschool group are so tremendously time-consuming. An outing that takes from 9:00 to 4:00 consumes two days, not half of one.

I'm tired.