The Whited News

I don’t know what my problem is the last couple of days. I feel just spent. I’m tired. I’m not feeling good. Low energy. I have not been motivated to do much. Why do I feel like the Kevin Spacey character on “American Beauty”? I mean, I doubt that I will be going into Taco Bell tomorrow morning and asking to have a position with the least amount of responsibility – but I can understand why he did it. The thing is, I cannot be this way. Maybe I can get by with being like this for one day, but more than that is not going to work out too well long term.

The constant demands of my time and energy have caught up to me. I’m probably being selfish, here, but I think it is fair to say that 80 percent of my time is devoted to helping other people and serving them. Carson is going through some very demanding times right now. Constant whining. This is normal for 15 month olds. Nothing pleases him for long. You know, when you have been at work all day taking care of other people and solving their problems, then you drive home 45 minutes, when you get home you are supposed to enjoy a pleasant evening with your family, right? Isn’t that the way it is supposed to work? Finally get home to relax, have fun, and enjoy your wife and family. Boy, I’d like to. I would like for things to be that way. When I get to within 5 minutes of the house on the way home, I start thinking, “OK, this is going to be a great evening”. And it is, for 3-4 minutes, after the hugs and kisses. Then it just gets numbing, because you are already exhausted and you have another 4 hours of nonstop tasks and busyness and redirecting. I do not want things to be that way. I do not want to have that attitude. But night after night, this is the scenario.

I just stood in the garage at 3:45 am this morning looking around. The furnace was having problems for the third night in a row and I was waiting for it to kick on. I was just standing there, disgusted at the condition of our garage. It is a freakin disaster. When will it ever get taken care of? Perhaps some weekend in a month or two it will get taken care of. Then, again, maybe not. Because we are approaching that time of they year when something’s going on every weekend. Jackson has been having problems, too. Last week, on consecutive days, he threw Grandma’s glasses across the room and he kicked Ma’am and told her she was a bad Ma’am. I think he has not responded well to the chaos that is his daycare situation right now. Our sitter dropped a bomb on us a couple of months ago that she was not going to be watching kids anymore. We had two weeks to figure out who is the hell would be taking care of our little boys. That’s a big decision, and one that I was not eager to make quickly. The result? Daycare facility on Monday, Thursday, Friday – my mom watches them Wednesdays, and Marie watches them Tuesdays. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate they help!!! Nonetheless, three different settings within a span of five days is not very stable for these young ones who need stabilization. That means three different sets of rules, three different schedules, etc. We just want to get through the school year and re-assess the situation. This is just a band-aid.

What I know is this: we have got to make some changes. More structure….more organization…more planning…more focus…more consistency. The problem is, in my eyes, that we need to get things in real good shape and get “caught up” before any change of lasting integrity will occur. The closets need cleaned out, the aforementioned garage needs cleaned out, dressers need cleaned out and old crap taken to Goodwill. Gravel needs to be ordered for the driveway and we need to purchase a shed to free up some space in the garage. The vehicles need to be cleaned up real good and the laundry room needs to be organized and used properly. Our house is in no way huge, but it is big enough, as long as we stay on top of the clutter. So – I know what to do. I know how to do it. But making time to accomplish these things right now is the real challenge. I need a week off work (which I just had a week off work to go to Gatlinburg!) when someone will watch the boys, and I just bust my ass getting these things taken care of. Otherwise this process will either not happen, or it will be strung out over the course of several months, and I not sure our family can wait that long before going flat-out nutso. But overall, things are good – really.