Day 15 - MC

Day 15 - MC

 

 

Today was my youngest nephew’s Anna-Prashan. This is a rice eating ceremony that all Bengali kids go through at 6 months of age. It is the time when the child is introduced to solid foods and of course rice is the first thing all Bengali kids should eat.

The weather was beautiful. All the children were in Indian clothes, as were most of the adults. Even Ro was in a traditional dhoti and kurta, Rajasthani style. It was the same outfit that Sathyam, my oldest nephew, wore to one of our friend’s engagement parties back in the summer of 2009. Crazy how fast time flies. I feel like Ro himself has grown so much in the past few weeks.

I’ve realised that when the odds of children to adult ratio is stacked against you, as in this case with this challenge, there are certain things you must be okay with in order to survive. I say realised because it did take me a week or so before I could come to terms with it. In a nutshell, pick your battles. I’m no longer on top of the laundry. And my kitchen is messier than I would like it to be. There you have it. At first I was doing laundry and dishes and tidying up every night after the kids went to bed, but I was super exhausted and not being able to keep up with them, especially Ellil.

The last few days I changed priorities. Now, I go to sleep when the kids go to sleep and I wake up when my body tells me to. The kids always sleep longer so I try to do laundry or dishes or tidying up or whatever needs to be done in that gap. If I don’t get to do all of it, I have to wait until the next available opportunity.  This means not all the chores get done. So be it.

The trick is really dissecting the urgent work and the important work. If something is urgent and important, you must do it first. After this we tend to automatically do the work that is urgent but maybe not that important in the big scheme of things. And other work, like the important but not urgent stuff gets left behind.

For example, dishes in the sink; urgent but not important. Urgent because the dirty dishes are staring you in the face and it’s hard to get dinner prepared with a messy sink, but not terribly important because you do have other dishes in the cabinet that you can use for the next meal. However, the task of taking your kids to the park.  Important but not really urgent. The kids will occupy themselves be it with dolls, cars or TV so taking them out isn’t urgent but in most cases playing outdoors in the park is a much healthier way to spend an afternoon than staying indoors, especially if you have an unexpectedly warm day during a cold, harsh winter.

Bottom line. Prioritize.