Trying to keep up

These days, I usually feel like I'm falling behind on everything - email, cleaning, the Never-Ending To Do list, just everything. There are things I have to do, that aren't getting done, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm doing good in that the laundry gets done every Monday, and we usually have enough clean dishes to eat dinner on (although DH washes the dishes these days, so I'm not taking any credit).

For example:

• We rearranged our life insurance last summer, after the baby was born. My policy came back higher than expected, probably from postpartum weight and all that. So, our agent says let's wait a year and get it re-rated, which would supposedly give me time to lose said weight and get into something resembling shape. I've got 5 months left. I lost some weight immediately after the baby was born (although, no joke, I was exactly one pound lighter when I got home from the hospital. I was retaining impressive amounts of fluid, mostly the $80/liter hospital saline.) but for the past six months the number on the scale hasn't moved. I haven't exercised, for whatever reason. I am seriously unmotivated, for starters. Plus, any exercise during the day has to be something I can take a baby along on. Yeah right. In the evenings, we're doing good to feed us, feed El Burrito, read the paper, and get to bed before midnight.
• EMail. Oh lord the email. My Yahoo inbox has, right now, 1307 messages, and it isn't even my main account! I have a problem with saving things to do "later" but never getting to them. An email might have a link I want to check out, or something I need to reply to, and instead of doing it now, I say "I'll do it later" or something.
  
• House-hunting. See yesterday's post on the lack of space. We've been saying for more than a year now that we need to get a house. All we're doing to further that goal is to look at the Real Estate Book every two weeks. That's it. Again with the unmotivation and apathy. About four years ago, we actually got a realtor and were looking at houses, but we couldn't find anything that we wanted that was also affordable. At the time, we were looking at houses with land (minimum 10 acres), and those, around here are either in truly sad shape, or horrendously overpriced. We saw some affordable, but truly scary homes, but more on that later.
• De-cluttering. I tend to be a pile-er. Piles spring up out of nowhere, I swear. I try to take care of the stuff in the pile, but it seems like I end up just rearranging the piles, consolidating piles, moving piles, and on and on and on. Right now, I've got a pile of things to file, and a box of things to sell or otherwise get rid of. I just need to actually get around to it. Then there's the large pile of things that need to be packed up. There's a massive pile of books in the hallway, blocking the closet door, that need to be boxed up soon. And a smaller pile of Breyer horses to pack up because I'm out of space. We've actually been boxing things up for at least a year, on the theory that whatever we pack up now, we won't have to pack in a rush before we move. Plus, it makes the condo look less cluttered, which helps my frame of mind, and is nice for when we have company. Good theory, but we need to implement it more.
• Errands and shopping. I used to go every Thursday to do the shopping and errands, after having lunch with DH. I could get everything done in one afternoon. Needless to say, that screeched to a halt after the baby was born. I was pretty much homebound for 6 weeks after the C-section, so I didn't go anywhere. Even after I recovered, there was still the fact that I couldn't schedule things so that the baby was fed at a certain time, and that getting both of us dressed and out the door was taking at least an hour back then. It got a bit better for a while, but I've been backsliding lately. We go to the library on Tuesday afternoons, but usually no errands then for some reason. This past six weeks, it's been cold enough that I don't take the baby out much at all. But this leaves us doing everything on the weekends, and it isn't working out at all. We sleep in on Saturdays, and with everything else, we end up eating lunch somewhere around 2:00. That doesn't work for me, especially with no breakfast - I am used to eating at noon, and I'm not pleasant to be around when I'm having a caffeine headache and my blood sugar is dropping. We also tend to be uncoordinated, DH gets up and says "Let's go" with little warning, and we end up shopping without any sort of a list, which bugs me unbelievably. Step one in fixing this is to start doing the shopping lists on Friday night while watching Monk and Psych, or on Sunday afternoon, while I read the ads in the paper. That way, we'll be a little more prepared.

And now I'll quit rattling on, and go clear out some of my Yahoo email.