Life Right Now

I'm having a hamster wheel kind of day today: pick up the blocks in the living room while Little Bear dumps out the duplos in his room, pick up the duplos while he pulls out all the books, put away books while he dumps the blocks everywhere... around, and around, and around, always cleaning, never making any progress.

When he finally fell asleep, I was torn; should I use the free time to finally achieve a neat house? Or should I try to make up for the two straight hours of fussing in the middle of the night by taking a nap myself? Of course, instead of choosing either worthwhile option, I wound up online... too tired to really be productive, not quite tired enough to sleep, just at the point where staring mindlessly at a screen sounds like something I can probably handle as long as I don't have to think too hard.

This is life right now, I think, looking around at the certain evidence of a little boy in the house: a dump truck driving over a pile of alphabet blocks, the mud-spattered ball that we only play with outside sitting in the highchair, Spider-Man tucked inside a sock under the couch. 

But that's not a fair thought, taking a day when we're both tired and then only focusing on the negative, and calling that skewed perspective the norm. We have good days, and fair-to-middlin' days, and days when we sit on the floor building towers together and reading P.D. Eastman and Al Perkins books for hours. Just this morning, he was shrieking with laughter as he tickled my feet and tried to avoid being tickled back. He's learning to say "clean up," even if he doesn't really do it yet... and he does help with some kinds of cleaning up. When I finish folding laundry today, he will happily run to put his socks in the dresser and the kitchen towels in their drawer. He's quick to put something in the trash can if you ask him to, and recently I've seen him running and throwing away trash without even being asked.

My slow recovery, which is still keeping me from getting out for walks or doing the deep spring cleaning that I want to, is definitely contributing to my feeling like I can't accomplish anything these days. And that makes sense. It's good to stop and actually think about it, though, and realize that maybe these "unaccomplished" days are what I need right now, and maybe things aren't quite as bad as they can seem.