Multi-tasking

Shall we talk about multi-tasking? There's no other way to get all the things done in a day that need to get done. We absolutely must get multiple things going at the same time. The book Men are like Waffles, Women are like Spaghetti explains perfectly the male and female brains. Men have little compartments that look like the little squares in a waffle. Nothing can cross from one square to the next. They can only think about, process, one thing at a time. Women, on the other hand, are like spaghetti. Our noodles are like noodles, all intertwined and tangled together, and all covered in sauce. You can't tell where one thought ends and the other begins. It's this noodley mess that makes our husbands scratch their hair and cock their heads slightly when we've finished an (extended) train of thought, as they try to compute what we've just said...where the first thought began and how it possibly changed into the last thought out of our mouths.

Once my brother-in-law was visiting us. He decided to take over the kitchen for dinner and give me a night off (yay!). There was only one problem. He started filling the kitchen sink with hot water to get dishes soaking before he was done working at the stove. Perfect idea in theory. A Mom at home with many kids probably could've pulled this off easy-peasy. But said brother-in-law could not. As the sink was filling and he switched his focus back to the dinner on the stove the sink overflowed with hot, sudsy water. It was a huge mess, and incredibly humorous (to me anyway).

I always compare this instance with one I had with a tiny babe and a potty training toddler (and one more in between there! Oy! I'm not sure how I survived). I was nursing my tiny babe, on the phone, and my toddler needed his sweet little bottom wiped, sitting on the toilet. Did I do all three at once? I did! I didn't drop the babe in the toilet. I didn't drop the phone in the toilet, keeping it perfectly scrunched between my ear and my shoulder, and I'm pretty sure the person on the line didn't even know of the acrobatic feat I was completing all while carrying on a perfectly normal conversation!

We have laundry and dishes to wash, noses and bottoms to wipe, meals to plan, toilets to scrub. In the midst of that we nurse wee ones, teach the older ones and, if we're lucky, chat for a few precious moments on the phone to a girlfriend (who might just be nursing a babe and wiping a bottom at the same time). Sometimes at night my head is spinning long after my body has stopped moving! It reminds me of this oh-so-perfectly true poem:

If You Give A Mom A Muffin

If you give a mom a muffin, She’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it.

She’ll pour herself some. Her three-year-old will spill the coffee.

She’ll wipe it up.

Wiping the floor, she’ll find dirty socks. She’ll remember she has to do laundry.

When she puts the laundry in the washer, She’ll trip over boots and bump into the freezer.

Bumping into the freezer will remind her she has to plan for supper.

She will get out a pound of hamburger.

She’ll look for her cookbook (“101 Things To Do With a Pound of Hamburger”).

The cookbook is sitting under a pile of mail.

She will see the phone bill, which is due tomorrow.

She will look for her checkbook.

The check book is in her purse that is being dumped out by her two-year-old.

She’ll smell something funny. She’ll change the two year old’s diaper.

While she is changing the diaper, the phone will ring.

Her five-year-old will answer and hang up.

She’ll remember she wants to phone a friend for coffee.

Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup.

And chances are…

If she has a cup of coffee,

Her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

Does anybody else feel like this about sums it up???