Saturday Everyday

While the Catholic Mom blogosphere is filled with posts about the wonderful twelve days of Christmas, and how Christmas isn’t over, and how we can keep celebrating, I am all partied out!

We are so blessed that my husband’s job gives him time off (“Paternity Leave”) when he has a baby, so he will be home with us for a few weeks. We are also blessed that our new baby has an easy temper and that I have recovered well, so we are more or less up and running, or at least we could be. The thing is, as much as we love having Dad around, as much as we want and need his help right now, it is very hard to get a normal routine going when he is here, so we are living one saturday after another. I know that most families are off of their routines because of the holidays, but I have to remember that I threw up my hands and stopped trying sometime back in early December, so my kids have been unstructured for almost a month now. Some of that time has been really, really fun, but it is time for us to get out of our bathrobes and get going, and we all feel it. The problem is, how can we do this? Do we try to incorporate Dad into the routine, or just pretend that he is not really here? Do I farm out the children to him a few at a time and focus on the others? I would love some advice from anyone who has had the experience of having husbands home for a few weeks. My husband is super helpful, and I have learned that if I ask (nicely) he will happily do whatever the family needs him to do, but I think that both he and I get frustrated by the lack of routine and clear expectations. On a day to day basis the rest of the year, we live happily in our very traditional roles — he works, takes out the trash, gets the car repaired, changes lightbulbs, I stay home, clothe and feed the family, keep the house in order. Right now, I am slightly checked out, in part because I am interrupted to nurse the baby or fall asleep, but my household tasks are not getting done. I start the laundry but don’t finish it, at four o’clock we both look at each other and wonder what to do about dinner. The kids are begging to start school again, so I let them take out some workbooks and get going, but even that needs to be done in a more focused and orderly way moving forward. So, please help us make a plan to get out of fairy land and back to our real life, as great as the sugar plums have been, we are all feeling a little bit of a holiday hangover!