Efficiency: Overrated?

For those of you who know me well and realize I have a very dominant Borg-esque love of efficiency: please don't let the title of this post give you a heart attack. I assure you, resistance is still futile.

This post is spawned by something my husband has recently begun praying every night before we go to bed, something along the lines of: "help us make the best possible use of every minute tomorrow."

I have begun growing increasingly agitated when I hear this. Honestly, I can't handle the stress of trying to make every minute be the best it can be. The only way to keep my sanity is to do something now, then do something else when that's done, and when I have any "down time" (waiting for the dryer to finish, or my experiment to incubate for example), fit in a few minutes for "leisure" activities. (Clearly, by the state of my blog, these down times have been far and few between lately.)

As much as I enjoy making lists and checking them off, I can't even force myself to use a day planner. If I were to try to schedule out each day, I would never be able to justify spending any time doing things I enjoy (and am even passionate about) just for their own sake. And I would quickly burn out. Well, I guess that's a kind of justification...

Anyway, I'm coming to realize that it's okay to ask God to help us make the best use of our time -- the pressure comes from my twisted thinking that asking for this means that I have to live up to it. So I suppose I'll have to stop elbowing Jon when I roll over to turn off the light. I'm also considering a different approach to time scheduling, which I'll post about tomorrow. See you then!

If you don't prepare for it, it will come...

Well, we had a fantastic time up on the mountain last weekend. On Saturday all three of us floated around the awesome indoor river pictured above...about, oh, a hundred or so times. Aurelia even went down a little waterslide 3 times! She wasn't too sure how she felt about it, but she's a brave little one. And a toddler who plays hard all day is a toddler who sleeps hard all night. Which was a good thing, since we had to share a room and she normally doesn't like to sleep if there's another person in the room. (Yes, weird, I know.)

Normally I pack with the "must be prepared!" mindset. The unfortunate side effect is that we have to haul around a ton of stuff on trips, the vast majority of which doesn't get used. So I've been experimenting with a minimalist approach. For two nights, one pair of pajamas and one blankie should be sufficient. And why would I need to take more than one pair of jeans for myself? Haha. It turns out I was tempting Murphy beyond his limits. 

The first night, the jammies and blanket were soaked. I don't know what on Earth happened to Aurelia's bladder (or her diaper!), but everything was wet. That's fine, I can improvise (and in comparison to the second night, the amount of "wet" was merely a trickle, which made for a very unhappy little girl at 6am). 

My jeans didn't even last that long. On Friday night, they were subjected to smushed bananas and had a special concoction of drool and Oreo crumbs ground into them by adorable little hands. Oh well, at least I didn't have to leave the room much. The only time I really wore them in public was at our niece's 2nd birthday party on the way home on Sunday, and I assume none of the moms thought twice about my stained clothes. At least, that's what I'll keep telling myself.

Lesson learned: Okay, so I don't have to pack up the entire nursery for a weekend-long family vacation...but always pack two pairs of jammies and two blankets! Maybe I'll wrap up the spare set in an extra pair of jeans. Oh wait, I'd have to own a second pair of jeans first...