It’s official

I had previously mentioned that the reason I intentionally decided to stop doing anything to keep the house clean, organized or in order was to allow seriously needed extra time to prepare for a major professional exam and that this is the reason why I’m not upset with myself and am willing to have friends see the house and also posted pictures. Up until yesterday, I was pretty sure that I passed based on my feeling about the test, but now it’s official. The pass list came out and there was my number. So, while I do feel ownership and responsibility for the mess that exists, I definitely do not feel guilt or negative feelings about it. Might not have been the best decision in the world, but it worked out for us.

Whoohoo!!

Now, we need to come up with our plan to address the next set of professional development work. I have a series of online readings, texts, and projects that I need to complete called modules. While we do get study time at work, it is just 260 hours for this set of work and it’s estimated to require closer to a thousand hours to get through. Thus, time outside of work is definitely necessary. Plus, getting through these requirements as quickly as possible makes sense as we get significant pay raises for successful completion and Trajan will just get older and have more activities and notice the hours that I’m missing more.

We’ll look at it this weekend, but I have some initial thoughts. First, I may need to gradually increase to the rate of work on the modules that I’d like to be at. This will allow me to have more time to do the catch-up work on the house and develop routines and systems that will make maintaining it easier. Perhaps for now I’ll keep one day a week to be substantially devoted to the house, even if it means taking a vacation day, and not have a single solid day working on exams. Also, we can think about moving up the schedule at which Trajan and I start the day. He normally gets to day care around 8, but he can go as early as 6:30. If we started doing that, it would give me an hour or an hour and a half each morning to work on the material at work before I began my work day. An issue with this is it would require him to start going to bed earlier and therefore cut down on my time with him on both ends of the day. I do need to keep reminding myself that he is only getting older though.

One thing that helps is that I’ve discovered that the site for all the online work runs on my iPhone, so I can use time that might otherwise be wasted to continue progressing through the material. This is nice, because in contrast to the textbook work, I already typically have my phone with me.

Working through the Clutter Diet’s workbook on routines and systems should also help us to identify ways in which Paul can also help to prevent the complete shut down from happening. And importantly, we need to arrange for a housekeeper to begin coming weekly. Ideally it will be the one that we identified last month, but regardless, it needs to be someone.

I definitely need to think on this and come up with some ideas and continue to revise throughout the process, but I will pledge to not just take the sticking my head in the sand approach!

And once more, yippee skippee for confirmation of passing the exam from May!!


PS: self, make sure and post a weekend goals list before end of day.