Juggling Cats

It appears I have already bitten off more than I can chew. It seems I can stay sober and decently fed, but not tidy. I can be tidy and sober, but can't manage a menu. The budget went to hell so long ago that it's not even on the radar anymore. I'm afraid to attempt another self-improvement step, because clearly I'm already in over my head. So I will have to cherry pick from the list and choose two or three to maintain each week.

This week was supposed to be dedicated to "Routines," which translates to being vigilant about the Television limits, meal times, homework and reading schedule for Grayson, and for the housework and planning schedule for me. I guess what Routines means is essentially integrating all the rest of the stuff.

But frankly, I still haven't put the books on the shelf that I bought and installed two weeks ago! Am I hopeless? There are two baskets of laundry in my living room (one, at least, is clean and folded), and I have yet to put away the giant economy-sized bundle of toilet paper I bought last night. It's standing on the dining room table like a monolith, lording it over the chaos of magazines, mail, books and mosaic in progress that also occupy the space.

Really, I suppose the most important rule to maintain right now is the drinking rule, because I've lost nearly 5 pounds so far, just from cutting back on those glasses of wine every evening. Exercise is somewhere on the list, too. But I can't see it from here. I'm too busy managing my Routines.

Routines. It's difficult for me to set schedules and parse out the day into little bits of pre-ordained activity. There's always a monkey wrench. Last night I bought groceries -- a highly necessary thing to do, since we were out of almost everything, the budget having been blown to smithereens early in the month. Groceries meant I got home close to 7 p.m., so everything else got pushed back. But groceries had to get purchased, right?

In the name of Routines, I also sat down with G and assigned him some handwriting practice. His handwriting has always been a weak point, ever since kindergarten, when he had fine motor difficulties and seemed determined to hold his pencil wrong and make his letters backward. I don't mean facing backward, I mean that his pencil strokes were backward. Where someone else would start at the top and stroke downward to make, say, a lower case "b," Grayson would start at the top of the loop and end up at the top of the stick. And, though he's right-handed, he's always held his pencil with the awkward, wrist-arching grip of a lefty.

Last week, in reviewing his schoolwork, I discovered that the new teacher is a stickler for penmanship, and he lost points on some papers for Es that looked like Ls, or for lower case Ts that towered over their uppercase brethren. So we are practicing. I gave him a page of letters to make, then I wrote out a few funny sentences for him to copy in cursive. Sentences like "Penelope's oranges devoured her toes as she slept" and "The King enjoyed crushing grapes with his earlobes." I had hoped to make the task less onerous by making the sentences funny, but Grayson got so tickled that he was silly, and his handwriting, sadly, suffered.

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and moms.