At least at work there's a time clock

I am having trouble accepting my new identity as a stay-at-home mom. This is very surprising to me, because I didn't even like my job before, and even though I knew it wouldn't be an easy "job," I was fairly certain I'd feel more at ease with the way I was living my life once I started staying home. Perhaps I just hyped it up too much, or maybe the learning curve is just a little steeper than I thought it would be. Even though I know better, I can't shake the feeling that I'm not doing enough every day.

I don't want to be one of those women who complains about how hard it is to stay at home all day, but then sits around watching soap operas and spending their husband's earnings. (By the way, I don't even know if those women exist, it's just a fear of mine that I will become something similar, or at least viewed as such by others). I feel like if I'm going to be at home, things should be clean and organized and under control.

Apparently my (almost) two-year-old didn't get that memo.

I started out this morning to do a few simple chores; I learned my lesson last week about big lists, so I made it much shorter today. All I wanted to do was put away the laundry. Unfortunately, because putting the laundry away involves going downstairs to the laundry room and then upstairs to the bedrooms, it became more of a production than I expected. I grabbed my basket of laundry and the new baby, then tried to wrangle the toddler up the stairs (he loves going upstairs, but of course today he just wanted to run away from me). After enlisting every appendage I had to hike up the stairwell, I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get the little one to stop crying and the big one to stop running down the hallway to the top of the stairs (every time he does it I can just see him tumbling down them, it scares me so badly). I finally decided that the only solution to stopping the baby from crying was to put him in his sling carrier...but this meant *another* trip down the stairs and back up.

My 10-minute chore ended up taking about an hour, and I still didn't fully finish it. After that, I got a little depressed about attempting chores, and now it's 4:45 and I'm not really sure what we did with the rest of our day. I know there was a lot of sitting down to breastfeed...and we did manage to make it to the grocery store.

I am just starting to wonder how other stay-at-home moms I know manage to have any hair left on their heads. Here's to hoping that time and experience will make a big difference.