April Accountability #2

To drive less.

Generally Bear and I go out almost every day Monday through Friday.  Then on Saturday we do something as a family, and on Sunday we go to church.  Church is about 30 miles away.  

That's a lot of driving.

We did however recently downsize from an all time four wheel drive SUV to a small car that gets 30mpg or better.  So that was step 1 in reducing our fuel costs.

Thursday and Friday this past week we stayed home.  And ya know?  Bear napped great.  He slept pretty well at night too, however I noticed he gets bored.  Probably because when I'm home I'm rushing around trying to clean up, do laundry, eat, go to the bathroom and he wants to be entertained.

So now I have to work on a schedule for allotting clean up time and play time.  And I need to make a weekly rotation so that my cleaning is effective.  I generally feel like I'm chasing our mess around the house.

So I decided to break down my day by what we already do that works. 
8:00 AM - Bear usually wakes up about now so I change his diaper and put him on the floor to play.  I immediately get his medicine ready and give it to him.  He needs to take his reflux medicine on an empty stomach so it's easiest to do it now.
8:30 AM - I usually sit down and have a cup of coffee while he is playing and watch the news to try to wake up.  Bear is DONE playing (and loudly letting me know) so I sit him in the high chair and attempt to feed him breakfast (he has a feeding aversion from all the medicine so it's a hit or miss game, mostly miss)
9:00 AM - After a lot of fighting, game playing, electronic toys making noise, I give up trying to get him to eat.  Sometimes I get a whole container of yogurt in him, some days it's a half a spoonful.  I then allow him to have a bottle and he chugs it right down.
9:30 AM- I rush around throwing laundry in and trying to tidy up dishes or unload the dishwasher, do a quick tidy of things, throw last nights bottles in the sink, etc.
10:00 AM - I look around at the state of our house and I just want to go out.  Usually about now is when I start getting packed up, I get him dressed, diaper bag ready and we head out.  Usually it's to Target, or Walmart or the small mall in the next town over.
12:30 PM/1:00 PM- Somewhere in here, Bear is ready for a nap.  Depending on what time we get out of the house and we get home this is when chaos ensues.
4:00 PM - Bear wakes up and depending on what we've done for the day I usually rush around trying to get dinner made and him fed and I'm just worn out.

The days that we've stayed home I've pretty much cleaned from 10-12 and this makes Bear frustrated because he wants to play with me.

In the next few weeks I'm going to work on creating a schedule.  It will be a very loose schedule, mostly just things I need to get checked off within basic time constraints.

My goal is to drive less.  Gas is over $3.50/gal here and depending on where you live, it could be astronomically higher.  Driving also emits carbon monoxide which is slowly killing our planet.  I'm a Stay At Home Mom who doesn't stay at home.  So for now, we're going to work on concentrating our efforts to stay home more and make a more productive use of our time out of the house.