Tag: priorities

Just what ARE your priorities?

Let’s imagine, hypothetically, that you were given two weeks. Two weeks when the kids would be in their appropriate child care locations. Two weeks during which time you would not be refinishing the baby’s room (as my husband would like to mention). Just, well, two weeks for whatever it is you decide is important.

Now, resting and relaxing (or chillaxin’, depending on your vernacular) is definitely on this list. But what else? What projects are you going to undertake? What “this needs 4 dedicated hours without children” tasks, so long delayed because you never get 4 dedicated hours without children, are going to make your list?

Worst of all, which ones aren’t? Because let’s be honest — if it isn’t important enough to make your 2 weeks list, what is it important enough for? Will it ever get done? Aren’t you pretty much admitting it’s a low priority? You might as well drop it from your mental memory if it doesn’t get done in this two weeks.

Well, it just so happens that this is the circumstance in which I find myself. I have two weeks (minus next Thursday, which is bespoken). I have a list of ten items of “work”. They are:

  • Do the taxes. (Duh, rather do them now then on a caffeinated Saturday in March.)
  • Rebalance our retirement portfolio. I’m porting my 401k and I need to know how to allocate it. Decisions decisions! Pretty much all I’ve concluded so far is that 31 is too young for bonds, and maybe when I’m 40 I’ll feel differently.
  • Write a budget. I suspect I won’t do this one, because I will reason that I don’t have my new check stub so I won’t know. The real reason is because I don’t think I’ll want to know the answer. The 20 or so months until Grey starts Kindergarten will not be our best.
  • Get recycling stickers from the town Dump. I’ve been meaning to do this for, oh, 2+ years now.
  • Clean out all the for-charity clothes. At some point I’m going to have to figure out what to do with all the baby clothes that Thane’s outgrown, too, but not this week.
  • Apply for a Home Equity Line of Credit. I did this yesterday, but the Magic 8 Ball said that we don’t have enough equity. I’d like the HELOC in place so that when our roof needs replacing, which was 5 or so years 2 years ago, I can just tap the line of credit. With the loss in value, though, our best shot will probably be to apply as late as possible. I hadn’t realized this would require refinancing our second mortgage, although that makes sense and I’m in no way opposed to refinancing the darn thing.
  • Clean the carpet in the entryway
  • Order and organize my pictures. (This is a little amorphous… but it’s been several months since I ordered prints and my originals are on two computers. What I’d REALLY like is a portable hard drive just for my pics.)
  • Update Thane’s baby book. This one is fun. I have first haircut pics. Probably makes sense to do this after I order pics. Hm.
  • Buy catfood and bring in a fecal sample. My life is full of glamor. This is just one of those chores that’s out of the way.

    Then there’s the goofing off. In broad strokes that looks like:

  • Fable (computer game)
  • Torchlight (Ditto)
  • Superbowl tomorrow
  • The Olympics (yay!)
  • Wild Hunt
  • ??????
  • Dinner guests I always plan on inviting but never get around to

    Finally, there are the Things That Need To Be Done. You know, the laundry, the dishes, buying diapers at Target (which seems to happen every 3 days or so) pick up the boys from daycare, exercising, do the regular bills (now with extra excitement from paycheck variety) cook dinner, reconstruct the house after the Thanepocalypse (how can someone so small make such a mess?)

    Then there are the maybes. Like bleaching our bedspread or cleaning out the tupperware cupboard or tackling the detritus on the hutch.

    When you look at it that way, suddenly 2 weeks doesn’t seem like that much. But I’ve decided something. First, to treat the fortnight as the gift that it is. Just because it’s likely to be rich and full doesn’t mean that it’s not wonderful. I could get all defensive about how it’s not so much time and it’s interrupted with daycare dropoffs etc so as to make sure other people don’t “count” the two weeks as a period of pure leisure. But I don’t think that’s honest, productive or fair. It is a great gift. Second, I want to prioritize the goofing. That might sound weird, but I almost always make time to do the things that need to be done. I am much less good about actually sinking back into the couch with a good novel.

    Finally, I want to make this a time of joy for my family. I want to take some of my extra energy and play better with my sons, and be a bit more patient. I want my husband to revel in two weeks of what it would be like if my energies were devoted to being a housewife with daycare. I’d like to spoil him a little. And I’d like to emerge from my hiatus energized, enthused, confident and ready to face new challenges.

    • Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also

    In my life as it is right now, there is tremendous pressure on my time. Working full time, commuting 1.5 hours a day, sadly being the sort of person who needs 8 hours of sleep a night, and taking care of two active curious boys is really time consuming, even when you have a great partner to do it all with. As things I enjoy have slipped away, it’s been enlightening to me what has stayed, and what I still make time for.

    I had no idea food was so important to me.

    I’m not a “foodie”. I don’t read recipe books for fun, like my sister. I don’t watch cooking shows or read cooking blogs. I don’t delight in new and exotic ingredients. In my perception of myself, I’m a pretty decent utilitarian cook who does enough to provide healthy tasty food for her family with a few heritage recipes thrown in for fun. Heck, when I married my husband I joked that I was doing so because I don’t know how to cook.

    But when I look at the TIME I spend in the kitchen making food, it totally belies that perception. This weekend I spent several hours canning. I cooked chili and cornbread for dinner Saturday night (1 hour). I made Crock Posole and Arepas on Monday night. Then I stayed up after I got the boys in bed to prepare smothered pork chops for the gamers on Tuesday. Last night we served: Pork chops with onions, au jus, bacon gravy, bacon, baked potatoes with fresh chives and sour cream, bruschetta with fresh basil and tomatoes on homemade bread fresh out of the oven (my husband made the bread) and corn. Fresh strawberries and blueberries made up dessert. This was a little more overboard than usual, but not wildly so. Certainly, it wasn’t the longest prep I’ve ever had for a game night dinner.

    We make roughly 3 “real” dinners (dinners with 45 minutes or more preparation) a week, and several little dinners (boxed mac and cheese, tuna fish casserole, IKEA meatballs, etc.) a week. If it only takes half an hour, I think it’s a moderate prep.

    Basically, I spend way more of my negotiable time on food preparation than pretty much anything else.

    We COULD do more takeout, although I don’t really understand how that works logistically. We could eat out more, although that’s not great on the budget. (To be fair, my grocery bill is pretty monumental. I’m increasingly coming to understand the impact that quality ingredients have on how a meal tastes and buying accordingly. Mmmmmmm blade steak….. But as a result, I’m not sure that cooking at home saves much money at all.) But frankly, my cooking is better than most food I can buy, up until the $25/entree price point. So I could pay to eat food that doesn’t taste as good as the stuff I cook.

    I’m not really sure how I feel about this discovered value. On the one hand, there are many ways these tasty family dinners are considered virtuous. They tend to be healthier than purchased food (although knowing how much butter/bacon I use, I’m not entirely convinced of that). They are definitely tastier than the kind of food we could afford to eat out every night. We eat together as a family almost every single dinner. Studies show that children who eat dinner with their parents at a common table do better in some metrics, like test exams. Theoretically cooking your own food costs less than eating out. And my husband and I eat entirely (delicious) leftovers for lunch during the week, and always have. Finally, I imagine that my children will be grateful (in retrospect) for my great cooking (their Freshman year in the dorms).

    On the other hand, the time I spend in the kitchen is time I’m not spending building block towers on the floor. I don’t have time to go for a walk with the kids before bed. I can’t make finger paintings with Grey because I have deadly chicken juice on my hands. Thane roams the kitchen floor, sweeping up old Cheerios and sampling tasty cat food while I work. This is some of the rare, precious time I have with my family and I spend it making bechamel and chopping onions. (Seriously, why don’t grocery stores sell 10 lb bags of onions?) And then there are the dishes. You have no idea how many dishes I can make.

    Once a friend of mine came to visit, and exclaimed in astonishment at how there was no takeout boxes in our fridge. I actually hadn’t realized, to that point, that what I was doing was optional — that there was any other way to feed your family. On the other hand, I know it’s possible to be even more into it than I am. Many of my friends are far more adventurous in their cooking and eating than we are.

    You can usually find out what’s important to people by looking at where they spend their optional time. We spend ours at church, playing games, cooking and outdoors. I am explicitly ok with the church, games and outdoors. I am surprised by this cooking thing, and not sure if I meant to make it such a big part of my life.

    What do you think? Where do you find yourself spending a lot of your time, possibly to your surprise? What do you eat for dinner every night? Do you think the time spent in the kitchen is worth it? If you were my children, would you be glad for the effort at meals, or would you wish I’d spent more time with you than cooking for you?