Letter from the editor — May

By Stephanie Fellenstein | | No Comments »

I realized the other day, that I have a problem.

I was actually sitting on the couch reading a book, a rare luxury these days. In the 0.25 seconds it took for me to finish one chapter, reach for the next page and begin to turn it, my mind had already wandered.

My problem is multi-tasking. I can’t stop. And, not only do I multi-task, but it has to be the most efficient multi-tasking possible. For example, before I start dinner, I throw in a load of laundry so it can be washing while I’m cooking. And since I’m going down to the basement, I gather up the recyclables and take them to the bins.

The problem is that I get distracted easily. While I’m in the basement, I realize I never finished cleaning paint brushes that have been soaking for a week. So I begin to clean the brushes and then decide to change the cat litter. By the time I get back upstairs, 40 minutes have passed and dinner still isn’t started.

I start dinner and while waiting for the water to boil, I also start making school lunches and write some notes.

“Mom!” someone yells. I single-handedly edit a current events project, find some soccer socks and fix the rhythm on a piano tune.

I’m feeling pretty good when I return to find half-made lunches, the half-written notes on the counter and the unmade dinner.

What seems like five hours later, the kitchen is clean, homework is finished and music practice is done.

I’m sitting on the couch with the aforementioned book when my protégé wanders through the room looking for something to do. A child after my own heart, she decides to alphabetize our DVD collection. A few days later, I find a stack of papers stapled together in her school take-home folder with a Post-It note attached: “Please read and then recycle.”

I think I have created a monster.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 at 6:22 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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