Looking Forward To Fridays

On Fridays we put Noah into daycare.  This may sound a little strange, but we do have good reasons.  The first is that we want him to have time interacting with other children.  The second is that it’s easier to get errands done.  Now that I have justified our reasoning to make myself feel a little less guilty, I will tell you that the main reason is so that I can have a break, and I really look forward to that.

I start forming a plan in my mind as to what I want to accomplish starting on Saturday of the previous week.  Generally the list contains projects left over from the last Friday because no matter how focused I am, my list is often too long.  For example last week’s list looked like this:
1. Design, carve and print logo (all by hand)
2. Scan and upload onto website
3. Write two post s
4. Print monkeys for Noah’s birthday party (by hand)
5. Various studio improvements
To help accomplish all these items I completely ignore house work of any kind. I can justify this because I work in my studio, located a couple hundred feet from the back door. I tell myself this is like being at work, and if I were at work, I could not do the dishes or mow the lawn.   This reasoning has worked thus far, though I suspect that once we lose Noah in the grass I will have to address the lawn mowing.

Noah has been going to daycare for about a month now, and I am still not used to not having him around. This past week I kept thinking that I needed to get his lunch together and while working in my studio I kept looking around for the monitor.  If I go somewhere, a glance in the rearview mirror is always followed by a shock because there is no little face looking back at me.  I love this time where I only need to worry about the project at hand, but I still feel guilty for planning my Fridays a week in advance, and I feel guilty for putting Noah in daycare. Part of me even feels as if I am giving up.  The only way I can move past these feelings is to tell myself on a daily basis that I need to take care of myself so I can better care for Noah. I do not want to become a worthless unmovable lump on the couch.

My list for next week is much shorter than this past week’s list, but I still have a few more days to add to it.  I know, though, that the excitement of a day all to myself can never compare to the excitement at the end of that day when Noah first sees me and, with a huge smile on his face, crawls over to me as fast as he can and sticks his arms in the air to be picked up.