A Life Update

I was never a procrastinator in school.  While some people thrive and produce their best work in the crunch time right before an assignment or paper is due, I despised it.  I preferred having things done early, to give myself wiggle room in case of emergency, and because I found that I produced my best work when I had both time and space to think.

My last two years of college I kept myself to a pretty strict schedule of completing assignments 2-3 days ahead of their due dates during the week so I could afford to do nothing school-related on most weekends that I spent with Justin (since we were long-distance, it was the only time we got to spend together).  Some of you reading this are thinking, "Girl, you are crazy!"  But I'm here to tell you that's just how I operate.  I'm a think-ahead, plan-ahead, do-ahead kind of person.

Until I got married.  And especially since I had a baby.

Ok, that's actually not 100% true.  I am still very much a plan-ahead type person in a lot of ways.  But recently, I have realized that it seems like I am always completing things later than I intend to.  In the area of blogging especially, but in other areas of life too.

I make myself piles of things to sort through and don't get around to it until months later.  I always have a long to-do list that mostly contains tasks that get left undone, and when I do complete something, it has likely been on the list for weeks or months.  I tell myself I'm going to clean weekly or every two weeks and a lot of times I don't until right before we have guests or until the house gets so dirty I can't stand it.  I wait 3 weeks until I run out of underwear and then do the laundry because I have to.

I know part of this is a natural part of being a new parent.  It's impossible for me to stay on top of everything on my to-do list because there just are not as many hours in the day to devote to non baby-care tasks as there used to be.  And that's actually a good thing and I really like that.  I love that my full time job is to be a stay-at-home-mom and wouldn't have it any other way.

When it comes to blogging, I usually have ten or so different posts started, or the idea for those posts at the very least, but I end up writing them a while after the idea came or the event I'm writing about happened.  Case in point: all of my baby James updates run about 2-3 months behind his actual age.

The problem I've discovered with this is that is it's WAY harder to get my creative juices flowing when I'm writing about something that happened 2 months ago.  I'm way more excited and inspired to write about my current happenings/thoughts/feelings/ideas.  I've always enjoyed using writing to process through my thoughts (my middle school journals are a quite the hidden gem) but I haven't really treated blogging as a way to do that yet.

So here's to a fresh start, at the very least in the blogging sphere of my life.  To think, be, and do more in the present instead of doing things late that I've been intending to do for weeks.  Maybe that means changing some of my expectations of what 'needs to be done by this time' and/or reevaluating how important it is to get done the things on my list that I've managed to evade for months.

So that's my life update.  I love that even though I had 10 post ideas sitting there waiting to be written for the past 2 weeks, this new one flowed out of me like cake because it's current and relevant to what I'm thinking and feeling at the moment.

Now don't you worry, I (probably) will not abandon (all) those 10 post ideas sitting there waiting to be written and shared with the world.  But I intend to intersperse them with more current content from here on out.  Pinky promise.  And now a pretty picture:

Image: xlibber via Flickr

THE END.