Momm-y-valuation Time

I've watched enough Wife Swap to know that family happiness lies in the middle ground. You don't need to be too much of a clean freak, but you should still avoid living in a pig sty. You can encourage your children to succeed without turning them into competitive little monsters. A mom's job is not to sacrifice life, limb, and sanity for her children but it's also irresponsible to be their friend instead of their parent. It is so easy to watch all the crazies on the show and think it is so obvious what they should do.

Still, the recent addition of our darling Baby Bug has made me come to the point where I need to evaluate our own family happenings for my own sanity's sake. Our life was going just fine before with a loosely defined schedule based on Monkeypants' internal clock. Worked for me, worked for Hubby, worked for Monkeypants. Unfortunately, when you throw in one 10 week old baby girl who eats constantly and rarely sleeps that kind of life takes a flying leap.

I mean, geez--I gotta sleep some day. And I'd like to see the floor before it rots under those piles of laundry. In my defense, it's clean laundry-I can get them in the wash and out of the drier, but I hardly ever have two hands to devote to anything-I'm blogging one handed as we speak-and I have yet to discover the level of jedi master that allows a person to fold laundry one handed.

If I've learned anything from my Wednesday night parenting TV it's that I must get control of this quickly before a break in habits turns into BAD habits that never change. Sooooo........what to do?

This is where I turn to my own Obi-Wan-Kinobis....my parents. They are the fully zen jedi masters of this parenting thing, so I called them up. My parents were swift with their verdict-appearantly it's time for me to get an all-for-real-totally-serious schedule and everything. Like with times on it.

It kind of scares me. I don't know if I can live by that kind of structure. I know structure is good, but I'm just not one of those people who can live by the clock. My parents insist that it's important though, and that it will help me keep some sanity and get some sleep...and at this point I'm willing to try anything.

So I'm going to break it down for Monkeypants Super Nanny style, with charts and jars and everything.

This is going to be an adventure.