Hours and hours and hours...

Its a "given" in life that TIME is of great value. But interestingly, regardless of where I have been in my life, I have always felt busy. Before children, I was training and showing horses 24/7 (or so it felt). With each step and change in my life, time has taken on new meaning. Looking back, the busiest time in my life was right after taking custody of Tiersten, which added a 16-month-old with serious lung issues into a family with a 4-month old infant, plus the boys at ages 9 & 11, and Mike & I both working full-time jobs outside the home. I still look back at that first 3-4 months she was with us and remember it as a blur. Thankfully, her lungs cleared for the first time in her life after just a few months in her new environment, and things got easier once the 3x daily breathing treatments stopped..........until now.

Now......suddenly, I feel like I've been thrust back into the blender. Our schedule is an absolute nightmare. While I believe that we're making the best choices with the options we have available, its taking a toll on our sanity. Yesterday, I even forgot a crucial component to Tiersten's day. When my cell phone rang from the school, we were in Olympia at the OT and couldn't do a darn thing about it and I just wanted to CRY! (Thankfully.....our school staff bailed me out and Tiersten was fine. Bless their hearts!) Bottom line.........Jennica's special needs DO require some additional time, which has to come from somewhere. The time that we previously spent in the early mornings/late afternoons/evenings doing the random chores that allowed us to collapse and have some "down-time" after the girls went to bed are now spent doing therapy exercises with her, cooking GF/CF foods, and reading a ton of literature on sensory processing disorders. Once the girls are in bed, we still have to catch up with all the other laundry, dishes, making lunches, emptying backpacks, grocery shopping, and the bazillion other things that every busy family requires. And then we fall into bed exhausted just to get up and do it all over again. I won't even touch on the subject of Christmas and how everything associated with that is going to play out, or the boys' wrestling meets.

So......WHEW! I'm tired.......and I admit it. I'm having to schedule work around Jennica's appointments and other things that can't be ignored, which means that I'm working less. I'm grateful to be self-employed and HAVE that option (although my "boss" isn't real happy at the business financials at the moment.....oh wait.........that's ME). Its a little scary to take the hit in my income on top of the hit that it has already taken from the floundering real estate market. But........it is what it is and my daughter MUST come first. We'll just have to figure the rest out later. I can't control the future, so I'm just having to live in the "here and now"--a very hard thing to do for a self-professed control freak.

But, in the meantime, if anybody sees my Fairy Godmother, could you send her over to my house? My floors could really use a vacuum!!!