The Days that ADD Gets Me

We are headed to VA for the weekend....yes the weekend...I suppose this is my penance for living far away...we have to travel 12 (or 15 depending on the family we are visiting) hours for a long weekend. Not that it is bad when we are there, but with three kids, the amount of planning, packing, laundry, shopping, cleaning and preparation makes it almost an insurmountable task the week before and the week of deconstruction (when you get home.)

This is where the ADD gets to me. People laugh at my endless lists and notes taped all over my house, but honestly? If I don’t have a list running at all times, I could conceivably sit with my finger in my nose all week and get to the day we are supposed to leave and say “whoops, honest, I forgot!”

So in order to avoid such things (along with not particularly wanting my finger in my nose) I have a running list of all the things that I have to do before I leave.

The problem is I have the attention span of Gnat on speed…so I start on one thing that I need to accomplish, like, finishing the laundry so that I can pack. This will last about…oh…10 minutes before I get distracted and go to the next thing, packing. After about 10 minutes of searching for things I realize that I have to finish the laundry before I can continue. At this point, it would be reasonable to think that I would go back to the laundry…nope…because I picked up a shirt with a cat on it and realized that the cats needed to be fed, and that I need to clean the box before we leave.

I go to feed the cats, which reminds me that I should make a list of snacks that I should get for the trip. I start to write that out, when I realize that we haven’t gotten the stuff for the Valentines Day cards the kids have to make…so I go in search of what materials we already have…

I would go on, but your brain is probably about to explode at this point… *

Needless to say, when I go to cross things off my list, I can only half-cross out ¾ of them…and that is a good day.

Rest assured, it will all get done…in Pie Time, which has been an incomprehensible phenomenon since…oh…about 1972…

Luckily, when Jamie comes home, and the house is turned upside down and there are piles of started projects in each room, he has learned to just let it be instead of commenting on my organizational skills…

Which is a good thing, because dealing with him might make it onto one of my lists, and who KNOWS what would happen then.

* and to be honest, this is really when I decided to take a break and blog about being disorganized, rather than get organized and finish...ONE taks today...