I studied under a violin professor when I was in high school. Playing the violin is difficult in that you have to keep track of many things at once (and do them all perfectly, of course). If you concentrate too much on one thing, others will slip. For example: Say you are playing a new and particularly difficult piece of music. If you focus all of your attention on the new notes, you’ll start to slouch and your bow will be all over the place which will make the notes flat and will affect the sound quality. I found this very frustrating. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t mastering anything. Even if I thought I was doing very well on one aspect of my playing, if I started to work on something else it would suffer. My professor would encourage me with this little analogy: Think of it like building a brick wall that is continually falling down. You can build one part of the wall and make it perfect, but as soon as you move on to another part of the wall it will start to crumble and fall down. And so you keep jumping from place to place trying to keep the wall standing.

Now what, you ask, does this have to do with anything? I have noticed that this principle applies to housework. For instance: let’s say that my house looks clean on any given day. I am willing to bet that no one had any clean clothes that day. Another example: The kids’ room is emmaculate, but the rest of the house? Disaster. You work on one thing and the rest goes to pot (forgive the drug reference…it was the first thing that came to mind. does that mean my blog is “R” rated now? Maybe PG-13…) Anyway, it cannot all be done. I have found that my friends who have spotless homes struggle with being able to just relax and spend time with their kids. They spend all of their time cleaning and organizing their home. Then there is the other extreme: those of us who would rather just ignore the squalor and play.

So when days like today come around and I’ve spent several hours making a Super Why! costume only to get up from my desk and discover the proverbial brick wall almost completely demolished, I find comfort in my professor’s analogy. I can rebuild the wall, but I won’t be able to finish three more sewing projects at the same time.

On another totally unrelated note, my wedding ring finally fits again! I don’t think I’ve been able to wear it for any length of time since Catherine was born over 5 years ago. It is unsizable (unless I want to buy another diamond and I think I’ll pass on that) and since half of the past 6 years I have been pregnant I haven’t worn it much.

The picture doesn’t do it justice, but that would be because I am too lazy to use the real camera (because why would I want to do it the stone-aged way and actually download the pictures onto my computer when I can just email them straight to Flickr from my phone?).

Speaking of phones….this is what my 2yo does every time he sees my iPhone:

Memooooooooooo! Memo memo memo! Watch? Memo? Memoooooooooooooo!

Roughly translated: “I want to watch Finding Nemo on your phone now, or I will scream at ear-damaging decibels until you give it to me which will totally defeat the purpose of you having a phone because you won’t be able to speak to anyone on it if you are in even the general vicinity of my screaming.”