source: oplesrope
When I wrote my “Organizing as Lifestyle…” post over the weekend, I really thought I was coming out of the six weeks of fog that have characterized this pregnancy. Unfortunately, the morning sickness is not content to leave me alone yet, and I’m back to feeling pretty useless for the most part.
I’m really not a lazy person in general, and I probably stuff too much into my day on a regular basis, but pregnancy has this way of making me want to sit around and do nothing. And while I’ve been pushing through it for the most part, I’m finding that I’m having a harder and harder time doing that. I don’t think it’s because the morning sickness is getting worse, because it probably is better than it was a week or two ago, but it’s more that I’m just tired of having to push through it, tired of feeling this way. I think I’ve had just a small glimpse into how hard having a chronic disease must be.
All of that to say that as I’ve been feeling sick and exhausted again this week, I’ve been thinking about ways I’ve scaled back my household chores and responsibilities to survive the first trimester. It’s easy to beat ourselves up – and I think this is especially true for mothers – when we aren’t doing everything that we feel like we should be doing. But the reality is that there are times when sickness, tragedy or a teething toddler need our attention. And it’s okay to scale back during those times!
For me, it means I’m no longer washing the dishes by hand. In fact, I am really only loading the dishwasher once every two days because I figure I’d rather just do twice as many every other day than having to do it every day.
It means that the laundry is getting washed and folded (ahem, for the most part), but not getting put away very often.
We’re having more pajama days, eating more convenience foods and my husband is handling a lot more of the daily chores.
There are a couple of things I still do almost every day, like making my bed and cleaning up the table and counters, but my standards are much, much lower than normal.
What things do you let slide when needed? What things do you consider non-negotiable? Are you too hard on yourself when you need to scale back, or is it easy for you to go into survival mode when necessary?
