The Reverse To-Do List

Time goes so fast! It feels like it was just the other day that my now almost 7-month-old was a tiny, squishy newborn!

November 2013

April 2014

What happened?

Oh, those first three months... wow, were they crazy. I remember everyone would try to tell me, "It will get better" and I would push for specifics. "How will it get better?" "When will she sleep for 3 hours straight? For 4 hours straight? Through the night?" "Will I ever get anything else besides feeding and changing a baby done again?" "When did you start cooking again?" Whew!

Now, a few months later, I can join "everyone" in saying that it does get better, but it is still pretty crazy. I still don't get everything I want to get done in a day accomplished. I remember the days before having a baby where all I had to do was write a list of things I wanted to get done in a day, and barring any laziness or procrastination on my part, I could get them all done. Now I can make a list, and I can usually do some of it, but who knows exactly what kind of a day it will be? Will my baby girl sleep well the night before? Will she nap during the day? Will it be one of those days where she is happy to entertain herself for a half hour here or there? Or will it be one of the days where she won't let you put her down for a minute? I feel like my ability to accomplish my to-do list has been taken out of my hands and placed into the tiny hands of someone else.

I assume that things continue to get better as she gets older, but I also assume that it is a truth of having kids that to-do lists are just more challenging. And let's face it, there's more on them now than there was before too! Being the Type-A person that I am, it started to really get to me that I couldn't get everything done all the time. I couldn't always be the mom and wife I wanted to be. And I know I'm not alone in this. It is hard, especially in those first few months with a newborn, to be okay with the fact that sometimes dishes won't get done, laundry isn't going to be folded the same day it's washed, you may not get your vacuuming done for weeks, and cooking? That's a joke!

Somewhere around the three or four month mark, I discovered a way to handle my inability to do everything and still feel successful at the end of the day, and I wanted to share it. I guess you could call it a "reverse to-do list." I realized that I felt like I was getting nothing accomplished when I didn't get everything accomplished. So I made a list and thought about it in reverse.

I made a list of some of the things I wanted to get done on a regular (and eventually daily) basis. It may not be an overly ambitious list, but I needed a way to affirm myself that I was getting the most important things done. This is what my list looked like a few months ago:

At the end of the day, I would look and see how many things I had gotten done off of my list, and then I would feel good about those things. Some days it was just two or three. Some days I was a rockstar and did five or six! I never got them all done in those early months. I'm still not sure I've gotten them all done yet.

And here is a secret - holidng your baby while she or he naps? That should probably be on the list. Those sweet newborn cuddles are going to go away, and it's going to happen fast, and you're not going to know what hit you. So savor those minutes. Five, ten, or twenty years from now, I don't think you'll be saying, "Wow, if only I had been better about getting my laundry done or cooking three-course meals when my kids were little." Maybe you will, but I'll bet not. I already miss how much time my little girl used to spend nursing and cuddling every day, and she's still under 7 months old. So some days I would think about my reverse to-do list and just decide I didn't want to do those things. I wanted to hold my daughter a little longer. And that's okay too.