Because I work from home, there are a number of things I’m expected to accomplish every day. Because I’m a consultant, I don’t get paid unless I actually accomplish them. Because I am involved in a move to a shoe, I have to get paid or we will ACTUALLY be living in a shoe instead of our hypothetical new house.

We are displaced for the summer but I’ve made it clear to our builder that come September 1 I’m back up north and we don’t want to live in my dented car ESPECIALLY because grossness of all grossness: a raccoon went in it the other day.

This was entirely someone’s fault, whoever left the sunroof open. I was putting the kids in the car and found granola bar wrappers strewn about. This is not evidence of any sort of crime, racoon-perpetrated or otherwise, since there are ALWAYS granola bar wrappers about. Clue 2: they were oddly chewed. Clue 3: they were on the front seat. Clue 4: raccoon prints on the windshield. Mode of entry: still open sunroof. DIS. GUS. TING.

Anyway we don’t want to live in the car, with or without vermin, and my next best bet is looking to be Residence Inn, where I can economize. What I’m spending on a hotel room I’m saving in wine and dinner–for Residence Inn is home to the every-day-happy-hour and for a month, I feel my kids can get the appropriate nutrients from a combo of school lunch and happy hour dinners. Mommy can drink her wine for free. And we’ll all of us retire to our one room and sleep blissfully without fighting, kicking, or anything.

But: where I started was what I’m expected to accomplish in a day which includes:

• Hours of conference calls. EASY.
• Without the baby chiming in OR any kids fighting in the background. IMPOSSIBLE.
• Work done that was discussed on the conference call. EASY–if it is brainless. And able to be accomplished while supervising (in some fashion) the baby and various playmates.
• Any “thinking work” has to be done in bedtime hours and that’s when I save time to enrich my brain with the Biggest Loser, Grey’s Anatomy, Blue Bloods, and any manner of show my husband deems beneath him (Note: Jersey Shore makes his list of “acceptable”. Not mine).

Now, it seems, I must also accomplish more.

This is what school has taught my oldest this year:

1. If I’m not happy about something (“I” being her) I can claim bullying and someone will step in to solve it. Even if what I’m not happy about is that someone wants to play something different then me.
2. It’s a free country. Thus I (still her) don’t have to wear sneakers for gym if I don’t want to or do my math if I don’t want to or any. number. of. things that the Constitution by design does not address.

Not helpful. This is what school wants her to know:

1. How to run a mile. She’s awesome, and creative, and such a good reader–but let’s be kind and say that physical fitness is not her thing. To put it more clearly, when the bear was in town, recently, I was PRETTY excited that her running club got cancelled because she would have, no competition, been the one the bear caught and ate, if indeed bears do that sort of thing, which I don’t think they do.
2. How to do situps. She’s made of pudding, in the middle, from what I can tell. But they told her to do some.
3. How to do pushups.

If you’re catching on to the theme here, I am most frustrated of late by the President’s Physical Fitness guidelines. They frustrated me in school when I was the smallest, slowest, least able to do a sit-up . The only thing I could do was climb the rope because (BACK THEN, TO BE CLEAR) I weighed nothing so I could get up that rope. My eldest takes after me and though NOW I can sit up, and run, etc–it’s from years of trying. After high-school years of not trying (my “sport” was cox-ing: that’s the one who yells from the back of the crew shell). Now she can’t do any of it and they’re not trying to teach them. They spend their days playing dodgeball (she stinks–I told her no one got ahead in life from being good at dodgeball). And then wham, the next week they’re expected to do sit-ups and run and stuff.

So now, in the already busy day, I’m operating a Jillian Michaels-style bootcamp at which I try to teach them how to do sit-ups and such (them, you ask? Yes. The twins are getting the benefit of this training too so I’m not back at square one next year). My question is are there kids naturally good at sit-ups? She’s got kids in her class that can do 50. FIFTY! Have they been spending summers training with the Army?

One twin is naturally athletic and not even she can really do sit-ups; the other has natural washboard abs and she can’t! It’s a skill, I guess, that you can learn (or try to re-learn after twins reside in your belly for months and stretch it all crazy).

Something’s going to have to give. I can’t give up my tv (if I don’t watch Tom Selleck who will? I mean, I’m not sure anyone else watches that show so seriously, can someone fill in for me or it’ll go off the air!) I can see that babies are going to soon be participating in conference calls, like it or not…it’s the only way I’ll fit it all in. LUCKILY she can’t really talk, but that’s a story for another day.

OH, a bear update. I found a picture of him on our town website, the last place I would ever have looked for a bear update (did they catch him? I hadn’t found out!) I came upon it accidentally when trying to find out when I could haul all my stuff that isn’t snapped up at our garage sale to the curb, since it won’t fit in our MDX. With the raccoon and all.) The picture was on the site…details on the bear’s current location: unavailable.

Tags: working at home, working mothers

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 9:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.