Help
With Your Rule
Hard to Schedule Babies...
Dear Holly,
Can the ideas regarding scheduling be applied when you only have a one year old and are pregnant or do your children have to be school age? I understand the basic premise that you illustrate with the Mother Teresa example. They were first bride's of Christ, not social workers, and their work with the poor stemmed from their love for Christ. But when I looked at your example schedule in the beginning of the book it doesn't seem something that would be feasible with a baby and things get harder and take longer as I get bigger (I'm only 5 1/2 months now but I'm already slowing down). I guess my big frustration with having a baby is that it's very hard to schedule or do anything or know how long anything will take or do anything without interruptions so my life feels chaotic a lot of the time
Labels: 4th P Parent
posted by Holly at 1:38 PM
1 Comments:
First off, there are some things that you are going to need to do every day, whether you have a baby or not - cook, do laundry, shower, eat meals, tidy the kitchen. Secondly, there are things we 'ought' to be doing every day whether we have a baby or not - prayer, quiet time, exercise, time with husband, a good sleep.
So whenever we want to pull our lives together, we need to begin with the main essentials. There is no tv show, no book to read, no professional development, no attic restoration, no feed-the-poor project at church in those times when we need to get a handle on our essential responsibilities. And our whole world will narrow and limit itself, at those times, to getting these basic responsibilities covered. And sometimes, like after the birth of a child, our physical and psychological stamina will only permit us to do these basics.
We need to understand this and not be afraid of limitations imposed by circumstances, or our physical, psychological or spiritual conditions. And we need to place our fears of not 'having a life' mortified when it comes to the needs of a little baby.
I think that when new little babies come, we need primarily to place ourselves in 'essential mode' for a few months (as this too shall pass), and not try to focus on everything else.
You know, come Christmas time in our home, I have to drop everything for a month or so - most of my computer, my schoolwork, my study plans - and I focus on what needs to be done. I do this two or three times a year, for a month or so at a time, to get done what needs to be done, and the computer time and chats with moms are still there waiting when I get back,
So much of stress , I think, comes from really not paying attention to the seasons of life. We try harvest when it is time to plant. Nature gives us a pattern of life - spring for planting, summer for weeding, autumn for harvesting and winter for rest. It is ludicrous to worry about winter in the middle of summer. It is silly for us to concern ourselves with our careers, for example, when we have a baby coming in the next two months.
Nature also gives us day to work and night to rest. With the invention of electricity and non-nature professions, I think we have eliminated, to our detriment, the natural progressions of life. Taking a break from certain activities, like our professional lives, to focus on essentials is threatening - we feel empty, life feels boring, we fear losing touch with others - when in reality, it is just time to mellow and breathe and 'be'.
A new child is such a time. Effort is to be expended upon getting one's rest, and good food, getting the dishes done, and finding a quiet nap time for baby so we can find quiet time to pray (or praying while we nurse). Unlike the dire warnings of others, this time frame only lasts a short while. Within three
months of having a new baby, essentials under control, you can begin to plan other essentials, second priorities, which you can then begin to undertake.
As far as a schedule with a baby, I suggest you set general meal times for your family, and try to nurse the baby before and after those times so you can get your work done. Take baby with you as you do things. And keep an eye on baby after the first little while, so that you can begin to determine natural lulls in his or her rest schedule, feeding schedule, awake time. You can develop a natural and comfortable schedule around this.
Please keep in mind that I had a baby when I began my rule. And the advantage of having school age children was that they helped with chores, which was necessary as I was homeschooling. But had they all been small, I would have spend more time on housework and general home and child management. Story time would have replaced the math lesson. I would have done most of the kithen clean up (and I would have kept it cleaner as I made the meals too! :-). New baby time is a season of letting go of the extras to focus and learn how to attend to essentials and learn to love. For this, you need your prayer time. You can find it.
There is nothing wrong with setting meal times, and pre/post meal cleanup chores, and to do laundry in the morning, and baths after supper and story and bed, and then prayer time for Mummy, Whatever you CAN routinize, DO IT! It may not need to follow the clock time, but it can follow a progression time....
morning is this, afternoon is this, evening is this...
Babies themselves are pretty versatile to family life.
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