Hump Day Picture Post

Billed fifty hours this past week again, which will make many a New York Big Law lawyer scoff (since they do more like 90-100).  But for this mom of three, doing 10-12 hour days even just five days a week is pushing me to the limit.  Although at any given moment, I could not tell you how having three kids is all that different from life with just two, since even with just two I spent every waking minute tending to one or the other.  But taken as a whole I feel much more frantic and pell-mell, careening from minute to minute, since I went back to work than I did before Craig was born.  And even on weekends there is no respite, because the kids are so needy.  I wish I could build in at least one hour a day – or heck, even like three hours a week – where all outside stuff was walled off and I just had uninterrupted time to do . . . nothing, or meditate, or yoga or watch crappy tv or whatever.  But there are only so many hours in a day, and when so many are spent in slavish service of either work or my very needy children – there’s just nothing left over.  Even when we do have a quiet moment, my nerves are so shot from being constantly interrupted, it’s hard to wind down and fully relax.

This current week I attended a nine hour nonbillable deposition on Monday, did seven nonbillable hours teaching a CLE in Florida on Tuesday . . . and it is this that makes me curse the billable hour more than anything.  I wasn’t off.  I wasn’t relaxing during that sixteen hours – I was working quite hard, at the CLE in particular, jawing away about the NLRB and answering questions on the fly.  But it’s as if I wasn’t even there – I have to make all that time up in the evening, after doing that value-added but nonbillable work all day.  Monday night I stayed up til 1:30 drafting a motion – I had to make up the hours that I worked but couldn’t bill to a client.  It’s grueling.  It’s designed to be this way, and I knew it would be going into it.  But some weeks it really gets me down, these post-baby weeks in particular, since I just had three months of wide open empty days of maternity leave that stands in stark contrast to this relentless grind of a schedule.  Couldn’t we find a happy medium?

But enough of that.  A private law firm is what a private law firm is, and little kids are what they are, and grousing isn’t going to change anything.  So.  This past weekend we spent shoring things up for the coming week.  I cleaned the fridge, grocery-shopped, made lots of food and froze it, did about a hundred thousand dishes and about a million loads of laundry, all that boring stuff that somehow takes all the livelong day.  We also went to a local aquarium yesterday, and then stumbled upon a SCA event in an old, crumbling fort, which was actually quite cool.  Don’t tease.  It really was – knights and maidens and that sort of thing.  (You might say that an exhausted mama should not go gallivanting about to aquariums and forts and such, but there is no relaxing at home with the kids around, and I find them easier to manage and to enjoy when we are engaged in an activity, rather than home with them destroying everything and fighting constantly and letting the dog escape and all manner of irritating things.  I am less irritable when out and about, then when I am home and trying to relax and the kids don’t allow it, by virtue of them being kids.)

So here are pictures of some stuff that’s happened lately.  Splat.

There are more pictures of more fun stuff on a different computer, but I am so totally wiped out right now that I couldn’t possibly drag myself over to it.