Day in The Life: Teacher mom of 2

Ok, I swear, I got not one, but TWO comment requests for a Day in the Life post. I was tempted to post a screen shot because I couldn't believe it, since my daily life is pretty much a cycle of sleep, work, play, eat, sleep. But ask and you shall receive. Read below for an extremely verbose peek into my fascinating hump day existence.

5:30: Alarm goes off. Unless I'm doing a morning workout, I start each day like this.

I always set my coffee maker up the night before, so I wake up to freshly brewed nectar of the Gods. Truly, I don't understand when other moms say they don't like coffee. HOW are you even alive? I'm really excited that cold brew season is coming up, really any day now. The only thing better than waking up to delicious hot coffee is waking up to delicious cold coffee, because that means I can get it into my blood stream immediately, vs. having to wait for it to cool down first.

I stayed up way too late last night reading a novel (Lilac Girls), so getting up was a struggle, much like it is every day.

5:30-6:45am: General adulting (cooking, cleaning, laundry, dishes, etc). I could do that stuff at night, in theory, but usually I'm pretty over it and just ready for some ice cream or wine (or both) in bed by the time the kids are down.

Today, I prepped dinner and put away dishes, toys, and generally tried to get things where they belong in our house. I started making Thai Chicken Enchiladas, which is a go to for me (although I always seem to forget about it).

My guilty (?) pleasure lately is watching The Office on Netflix while everyone else is asleep and I cook. Normal, right?

6:50: We divide and conquer attack to get the kids up and ready. My boys love their morning sleep, and that shouldn't be surprising, since they are the best kids ever #notbiased.

Royce is usually sitting quietly in his crib just waiting when I go in, and he gets all excited and stands up and bounces when he sees me. Swoon. 

Not that I can ever get a good picture of it. 

My favorite part of the day - we sit in the dark and nurse.

Eric gets Dalton up. He wakes up like I imagine teenagers do - reluctantly and with great difficulty (definitely his mother's son here).

Once everyone is up, changed, and dressed, we begin the mad rush to get out the door. 

One of us will try to "reason" with Dalton to brush his teeth, allow us to put his hair goop in, and go potty. Today he picked out his Easter shirt, which I searched high and low for the week before Easter but it never turned up. May 31 is just as good, right?

"Reason with me. LOL".

The other will pack up some frozen breast milk for Royce (I still have some so we send it), get a clean wet bag for cloth diapers at daycare, and load the bags into the car. Eric aims to be on the road with the kids by 7:10, so for those math deficient like me, that only gives us twenty minutes from kid wake-up to driving off! 

If you look closely, Royce has Dalton's banana. Can't take your eyes off your food for a moment around here!

When it's just me, I spend about 4 minutes throwing on a dress and attempting to tame my hair. I ran out of time for makeup, but since I spend my day with pre-teens, I think my time is better spent on prepping a delicious dinner. Makeup or not, I always use eye de-poofing stuff and sunscreen on my face! Usually just target brand lotion with spf but I just found this sample of the good stuff and I hate that I love it.



Other morning essential: chub rub spray. Without it, I know true suffering.

Ignore that it says foot spray and just trust me on this one.

Awkward selfie

7:30am - The absolute last minute I can leave for work and make it on time!

7:55am - Work. Breakfast while I'm on hall duty. I fancy.

The kids love the hard boiled egg smell.

Other highlights include teaching, meetings, grading, etc. I thought I was going to have to make copies but the BEST MALE TEAMMATE EVER ZACH RATAJ made them for both of us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

10:45am - Lunch. Yep. I'm looking forward to summer when I can eat at a normal grown up adult time. Still, now that I'm done pumping, I get to actually eat with my teammates and have fun and hang out with people. Have I mentioned I'm excited for summer?

BBQ chicken sandwich and veggies with Whole30 dip (leftover recipe from my Whole30 days)

12:30pm - Coffee #2. I teach five classes a day, so when I'm through about 2.5 of them, I break out my work cold brew. Have I mentioned I love coffee?

This coffee is extra special because my friend Lily brought it back for me from Colombia! 

Yummm straight from the source.

3:30: Daycare pickup - another one of my favorite moments of the day! I love the middle school schedule, I can get my boys so early! It's finally nice and sunny after weeks of gross rain, so I tell Dalton we can set up the water table when we get home. First question: "Royce play in water table too?".

Parenting pro tip - put the sunscreen on them while they are in the carseat and can't escape.

I even bought that fancy organic kind one time.

As soon as we get in the house, it's perfectly clean and I'm so grateful I got up early to pick up the toys this morning.

4:00: We just hang out, playing with the water table and getting soaked. Heaven. It's so good to finally be playing with my boys after missing them at work all day.

My world, right here.

They make me happy. 

4:45: Eric gets home from the gym and takes over outdoor supervision while I finish dinner, then we all play while it bakes.

Get in my belly.

Their clothes did not make it. The water table won.

6:00: Dinner!

Sorry Mother Earth, I had leftover paper plates and I'm lazy.

Usually we all eat together,  but this night is unusual because I was going to an evening workout class, which I never do. Every time I think about doing a DITL post, there's always something about the day where I'm like, oh, nope, can't do this day because X was out of the ordinary. But apparently that's every day, so I have no "ordinary". Anyway, I just had a few bites of enchilada to tide me over while everyone else ate. 

6:30: Gym time! I took a creepy selfie in the dark to prove I went, like a real blogger!

Normal.

We just rejoined the YMCA. It's really important to us for the boys to learn to swim, however, swim classes for two kids are ridiculous. At this age, it seems like swim classes are mainly just to get them acclimated to being in the water, so it's lot cheaper to just sign up for a family Y membership and take them ourselves, plus then we can go more often and use the gym. Dalton will be starting actual swim classes next month and based on the description it seems like they do teach legit swim skills. And that was a huge tangent in my DITL post to explain why I was headed to a "late" night barre class. 

6:35-7:35: Barre. It hurt. So many lunges. So many planks. 

The kids go to bed between 6:30-7, so this class timing wasn't too awful for my working mom guilt. I realized how far we've come that one of us doing a solo bedtime was no big deal. Back in the day, during basketball season when I was on my own at least 5 nights a week, I really struggled with bedtime. Royce was exhausted by 6:30pm, but still needed to nurse to sleep in a silent, dark room, which didn't work out because my velcro toddler who wouldn't let me out of his sight was wiiiide awake and still bouncing off the walls at that time. Fun. Now Royce just gets slam dunked in his crib and Dalton is happy to hang out alone with Mickey, so it's a lot easier. 

8:00: I'm home, the kids are in bed, and I eat my full dinner.

8:15: I eat leftover pie from our Memorial Day BBQ and hang out with Eric. 

PIE

It's fun for him until I ask him deal with the dishes because I just can't tonight.

9:00: Shower, and get in bed. I should just turn out the lights and go read my book so that I fall asleep nice and early, but instead, I feel the need to read the entire internet. 

10:30: Finally, sleeeeeep.

And that's how I spent May 31 in my ever thrilling life!