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Cathy: More on multi-tasking moms

Baby C has a new trick. When she is nursing herself to sleep as I type, she now kicks my one typing hand over to where she can hang onto it with a foot and a hand. Now I can’t type at all. But is that really such a bad thing? After all, I should be using this precious time to bond with my little infant, right? But I really want to answer that email/add to the manuscript/compose a blog. So maybe she’ll grow up with an unnatural attachment to PCs. Apparently I have developed one, is that so bad?

Today (Tuesday as I write this to be posted later) is my son S’s tenth birthday. I wrapped his presents, while considering that I am missing half the cake ingredients, our bank accounts are drained from last week’s travels—gas alone was unmentionable—and honey gets paid tomorrow. I had K go out to the van to get the play yard (really, baby holding pen, let’s call a spade a spade). However, two sides refuse to go rigid for us. We tried everything—quite comically. So I put her in it anyway, and just wrapped away, on the floor right next to the pending crisis of collapse, while on the phone with a possible new client; and frantically waving S around to the front door so he can’t see what I’m wrapping by coming in through the slider in the office. Why am I trying so hard to hide these from him now, when he already found them? Because I can, I must. Maybe he didn’t see everything.

My mother-in-law just came back from her morning exercise. She has agreed to go to store for confectioner’s sugar and butter. Phew, one thing down. I don’t have to go to the grocery store and risk overdrawing my humble account. There will be chocolate frosting for the cake. And butter in the cake itself. Now, I just have to make both; switch the laundry from baby C’s pee accident on my bed this a.m., where she thoroughly soaked through every layer from comforter to the mattress pad; make that bed after two rounds each for two loads in the dryer because the sheets and comforter and mattress pad always twist up in knots around themselves and don’t dry on the first round. And there are still the two baskets of yesterday’s clothes unfolded, wrinkling for first week of school.

In the meantime, I’m still thinking about what I’m going to charge this woman for a curriculum consultation for her home-schooled child with special needs; trying to consider lunch and dinner options from what’s in pantry without over–pasta-ing the day, and it’s already 11:49; and I’m pinned nursing again, typing and fending off kicks, while also staring at the box of baby hand-me-downs taking up precious space waiting to be wrapped and sent off to friends expecting a girl any minute now, several states away. K has disappeared behind his locked bedroom door for the fourteenth time today already, completely sealing himself off with his MP3, so I can’t holler up to ask him for help again. S is wandering the house, humming and wanting a little attention and something to do. He wants to ‘sacrifice popcorn’ to the dog, because it’s fun to line up popped kernels on the couch and watch her lick up the row one by one with her long, fast, curly tongue.

I won’t even mention that box of papers that still need to be organized. Oops, too late! Now, baby C is asleep on me, I pray I can put her down without her waking up in the collapsing pen, so I can get started on that cake. Now what’s all that nonsense about scheduling and prioritizing, again?