When my Farmer comes home in the evening, we sit down to supper, thank God for his blessings, take a deep breath, and, after a bite or two, ask each other about our days.
"How was your day" I might ask. And he'll tell me about spading and invoices and fertilizer and equipment design and interpersonal management.
And then he'll ask me, "and what did
you do today?"
And I'll think to myself, now
there's a good question. What
did I do today?? "Laundry," I might answer - usually a safe guess - or, "cooked supper" which is also nearly always true. But the day is many hours long, is it not? I'm pretty sure I didn't spend
all of them doing laundry or cooking supper. What, then, did I do??
So one day last week, after my Farmer waved goodbye from the Box (our Scion xB) as he turned out the driveway, I grabbed a nice long receipt from Kmart, and turned it over to keep tally on the back. I was determined to find out just what I did do all day.
I got as far as 1:30pm. Here's what my research found:
5:34 (I had to think back a bit from when I started writing around 7:30) - hit snooze on alarm
5:38 - hit snooze again
5:42 - hit snooze, roll over, turn alarm off and get up. Shower, contacts, dress.
6:10 - check email &
facebook while making coffee, read Bible
6:40 - make eggs for my Farmer & me; eat together and chat about our week
7:15 - 9:00 - a bit of a blur as the children come down for hugs & get their breakfast ready, put away dishes, feed cats, etc. I get Lil' Snip up, change his diaper, spoon oatmeal into his mouth while he distracts himself with Legos, dress him, tell everyone the agenda for the day (we're on spring break, so no schoolwork - hurray!! - just housework and play plans). Somewhere in there my Farmer kisses us all and goes to work, I start some laundry, oversee the girls' morning chores, take some clothes to the attic for yardsaling next month, and play Legos with Lil' Snip and Nice.
9 - 10 - put Lil' Snip in his crib for some morning quiet time, work on the budget, place an Amazon order, continue to oversee the girls' chores, and then bring Lil' Snip back down to play.
10 - 10:30 - comparison shop on Amazon for purses I will probably never buy.
10:30 - 11 - brief phone call from a new friend, business call to the dentist to make appointments and inquire about getting a crown (ugh), switch the laundry over to the dryer, make up some
baking soda shampoo, and take the mail out to the mailbox.
11 - 1 - play Legos, start beans for supper, experiment with neodymium magnets and duct tape, look for my crab soup recipe, clean recipe box, fold laundry, try (and, largely, fail) to find out online whether it's better economy to buy new or refilled HP ink cartridges, read the grocery flyer and make up my list, during lunch when Victoria Falls comes up in conversation look up and admire video footage of the falls on youtube and possible origins on wikipedia, take photos of Sugar's birthday duds, load photos onto the computer and send them to my sister-in-law, read to Lil' Snip & put him down for his nap.
1 - 1:30 - read to Sugar, Spice, and Nice from
Those Happy Golden Years, send them upstairs for quiet reading time, and work on my homework for the Bible study we're doing in our moms' group.
At which point I evidently abandoned my receipt (which was nearly full anyway). Let's just assume it was more of the same: lots of unremarkable little things that end up taking all day, and don't make for very interesting conversation.
But at least now I know.
[and, for the record, writing and editing this post took me about three hours - interspersed, of course, with receiving various mysterious blanket-and-ribbon-wrapped Lego creations, charting cross-stitch on graph paper & counselling a frustrated stitcher, putting down Lil' Snip and getting him up from his nap, receiving a ten-I-mean-40-minute phone call from a friend, getting everyone outside and then getting distracted and accidentally weeding three flowerbeds, coming inside for a pruners and seeing that it's time to make lunch ....]
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