Hi, all! It’s almost 9 on a Wednesday night and I was hoping to turn in a little early, but my brain is in hyperdrive, so here I am. I thought it could be interesting, or at least informative, for me to share what a typical “day in the life” looks like for us right now. All this will change when summer comes and then again when school starts and X-man begins kindergarten (I can’t even think about that right now), but for the moment, it goes a little something like this.
Good Morning!
On a good day, the kids sleep until 6, but frequently the twins are up at 5 or earlier. We want them to learn to stay in bed until 6, so we let them play quietly in their beds until we get them up. Then we hit the ground running because the twins have to be changed, fed, and dressed by the time their bus comes at 6:45. After the bus comes, the rest of us have breakfast and get dressed. Dr. S heads off to work about 7:20 and I do a few chores with X-man until it’s time to take him to preschool at 8:20. I get home at about 9:15, unless I pick up groceries at Walmart, then I’m a bit later. I try to do my chore-of-the-day when I get home, but sometimes I just sit and be quiet for a bit. The twins’ bus comes at 10:20 and if the weather is good, I boot them out into the backyard for a while. Our backyard is like Disneyland. We’ve got a great swing set, a jungle gym, sandbox, and a huge trampoline, which is by far the favorite apparatus.
Busy afternoons
Anyway, we leave for therapy next, usually around 10:50 so we can get there at 11:30. I drop the twins off at ABA and then head to pick up X-man at 12. Then we either run errands or head home until we pick them back up at 3:30. We get home a little after 4 where our awesome Personal Care Aid (PCA) is waiting for us. She takes care of the boys while I get dinner going. Since all my guys have a variety of food allergies, sensitivities, and general picky-ness, I usually fix the boys their dinner and then more grown-up food for the three adults. The kids eat at about 5:15, then the adults eat around 6 if we’re lucky. All three deal with texture aversion and fine motor delays, so it’s usually a 1:1 feeding scenario. X-man can feed himself most of the time, unless it’s something that’s “not his favorite”, then we usually have to feed him just to avoid the meltdown. The twins are getting better with utensils, but will still end up with more on them than in them and they lose focus quickly.
Is it bedtime yet?
After dinner, we let the kids play for a bit before baths. Bath time starts at 6:30 and we’ve usually got everybody in bed by 7:15. We get things cleaned up, eat dinner if we didn’t get a chance to earlier, and then collapse until we go to bed around 10. We get a full night about 85% of the time. There seem to be phases the twins go through where we have a week or two when they wake up in the middle of the night every night and Speedy especially is not good about going back to sleep. Then we’re back up at 6 to start all over again.
Phew!
In general, I can drive between 600-800 miles a week (I actually call myself a stay-in-car Mom instead of a stay-at-home Mom!) We live way out in the county, so we have a pretty sizable drive to get to all our therapies. When X-man starts kindergarten in the fall, that’ll be a whole two hours of my life back, and I have no idea what that will feel like. Maybe I’ll get to exercise and have a Bible study. I hardly dare hope!
Well, that’s it! That’s a glimpse of what our lives look like from day-to-day. What do your days look like? Let me know!
