Fear Factor

I am afraid. Very afraid. We're only on Day 6 of the school year (a Monday), and already I can see that this year is going to be challenging in ways we've never dealt with before.
I started the year out well. My planned morning routine is to get up at 6:30, shower and dress and make Bethany's lunch by 7:00. At that point I'd wake up the girls, and get them going, then start on breakfast and packing snacks. Ideally, we'd start eating at 7:30, so they can be finished and ready to head out the door by 8:00 to catch the bus. Sounds good, doesn't it?

I'm finding that life rarely runs according to plan, though. I did just fine for the first day or so, but by Wednesday, I was definitely dragging. It was much closer to 7:00 before I got up than 6:30, and I'm not even going to talk about the end of the week. By Saturday, I was so exhausted, that I slept a good portion of the afternoon away. I just couldn't make myself move. And that's just me. Just about everyone in the family is showing signs of wear. Everyone is cranky, and hard to get going in the morning. I have to fight to get the kids up and dressed. Today, it took Bethany half an hour to get dressed after she got up. Sean may just go back to having a daily nap. Meagan actually did pass out for an hour at church yesterday.

Poor Bethany is going to have it the roughest. Besides this being her first year of full-day school, she also has a lot going on extracurricularly. I signed all three kids up for gymnastics, starting this Thursday. Sean gets a 30-minute, Mommy & Me class in the morning while the girls are at school (I'm actually looking forward to that one), and the girls are in the same class in the evening, starting at 5:15. Their class goes for an hour. Aside from that, she has an hour-long Occupational Therapy appointment on Mondays, and starting next week, an hour-long Speech Therapy appointment on Tuesdays. The poor kid was going all day long in school, came home and had less than an hour of down time before we headed off to OT. We rushed home from that and she worked on homework while I finished up dinner (that I had actually started in a crock pot before we left). Directly after dinner was Family Home Evening, and then the kids went straight to bed. Except for Bethany, who stayed up a bit to finish up homework, have a snack and a bit of downtime. It was a pretty brutal day, and I don't see Mondays changing any time soon.

With Speech on Tuesdays (5:30-6:30) and gymnastics on Thursdays, I don't see the pattern changing much on those days, either (minus FHE). That at least will give Bethany a bit more of a break, but I honestly don't see how I'm going to manage dinnertime. I can only make so many crock pot meals. Domino's down the street has a great deal on pizzas M-W, but Bethany doesn't eat pizza, and I don't want to eat pizza that often, either. I can hope that Nate will get home early enough on some of those days that he can take Bethany to her therapy while I make dinner (it's too much to hope that he'll make dinner while I go to the appointment), but I'm not counting on it. He told me that he can guarantee to be home early on one day of the week, and the others are on a day-by-day basis.

Maybe I'm just being a pessimist. Maybe it's just my exhaustion talking here, and we'll eventually adjust to the crazy schedule. I sure hope so, because otherwise, this year will really stink.