A couple years back, I participated in Trish’s “A Day in the Life of…” event, which happened to be my life as a stay at home mom in the middle of spring break. Not sure why that particular event came back to me this week, but early on Tuesday morning, I decided to record a typical day at present, as a stay at home mom with most of the family homebound during quarantine.

6:33 am – For the second day in a row, I slept without sleeping pills (yay!), and so woke less groggy than normal. I turned on the flower-lights over my bed, and lay around a bit, playing on my phone as I fully woke up. In my dream, I’d been trying to remember a specific song, and as soon as I woke, I knew it – an old Christmas song I’d once sung as a trio back in the early 2000s. Mary’s Lullaby. After half an hour of lying around, I got up, weighed in for the morning, and went to the kitchen for some water. At that point, I discovered that the boys forgot to start the dishwasher last night, so I filled up the last space left and set it going. Then I got water, opened up the blinds, and came back to my room to sort through emails, write in my journals, and plan my day.

7:30 am – Breakfast! This morning’s breakfast was Fage Total plain greek yogurt with blueberries, honey, cocoa, and wheat germ. Atticus begged for some yogurt, so I let him eat a bit of the plain stuff off my finger, then brought my bowl back to my computer so that I could read the next preview chapters of Rhythm of War while I ate. They weren’t there – I found out later they wouldn’t post until 8am – so instead I planned a hiking route for the next day while I ate. When I finished breakfast, I went back to the kitchen to rinse my bowl, and discovered that a part of our Spot Bot had gotten stuck in the garbage disposal and I had to get it out. The glories of everyday life, right? Then I got a tumbler of iced coffee and brought it back to my room, now ready to read through the newly-posted Chapter 12 of RoW.

8:45 am – I took a break to get more coffee after reading Chapter 12, and when I got back to my room, I found Nimi curled up in my bathroom sink. This has become her morning ritual, and as soon as she saw me, she left the sink and waited for me to run water for her in the other sink. That done, I returned to my computer to read through the accompanying Chapter 12 discussion post, with many side searches through the Coppermind for various Cosmere and Stormlight connections. I take my Stormlight lore seriously, y’all!

9:15 am – Time to exercise! I changed into my exercise clothes and did a yoga warmup. At that point, the morning was interrupted by workmen. They’ve been putting up new deck posts so we can build our deck, but two of the posts they installed were wobbly and definitely wouldn’t have held up the weight of a deck (much less a three-season porch, which is the eventual goal, and which they know and said they’d install for). After taking that little break, I moved into my strength training workout for the morning, a program set up by my Girls Gone Strong personal coaching course: deadlifts, split-squats, seated rows, hip abductions, overhead press, and standing chops.

10:12 am – Post ST, made myself a protein shake for recovery: beets, spinach, peaches, blueberries, apple juice concentrate, whey protein, cocoa, and cold brew concentrate. It was not my favorite. While I like beets in smoothies generally, especially with coffee and chocolate, frozen beets are much stronger and overpower the flavors rather than complimenting them. Blurgh. Oh well. I’ll just use fresh roasted beets from now on, I suppose. Anyway, I drank my shake while doing post-ST stuff: putting away weights/bands, entering my reps/weights/etc info on my GGS coaching program, entering individual exercises into my Garmin, etc. Then I caught up on some blog stuff and feedly while I finished the shake.

10:50 am – More water for Nimi in the bathroom sink, and then I showered and got ready for the rest of the day. With my headphones in so I could start on a major backlog of Real Life Ghost Stories Podcast posts, I headed to the kitchen to chop and roast some carrots to accompany my lunch. While they roasted, I unloaded the now-clean dishwasher, and conferred with Jason on Laurence’s wisdom teeth/dentist/money issue (which remains an ongoing problem). When that was all done, I realized that I wasn’t yet hungry (re: protein shake). My quads also hurt – the ST workout today was a new one and worked muscles differently than over the last six weeks – so I decided to go on a walk. The weather was sooooo gorgeous out, low 70s, cloudy, with a cool steady breeze. (This was the extent of what San Antonio saw from Beta.) It was the first time in months that I’ve gone on a long walk in my neighborhood, and I had a lot of nostalgia on seeing certain houses and streets. It was also a bit weird to pass my old house, which is probably the reason I haven’t been walking the neighborhood since we moved. In any case, I saw gorgeous flowers, a bizarre mounted moose head on someone’s siding, and a beautiful snail with yellow shell that I wish I’d stopped to photograph. Over my 2.7-mile walk, I managed to get through another couple RLGS backlogged podcast posts!

12:53 pm – The walk left me quite hungry, so I immediately made my lunch on getting home. We generally eat leftovers from the night before for our lunches here, and Ambrose was in charge of dinner the previous night. He made French dip complete with homemade bread – yay for having a baker in the house! – and the large sandwich with a side of roasted carrots was perfect. Had a text conversation with my friend Stephanie, and got the updated details for the new dental arrangements from Jason (as it turns out, the previous dentist wasn’t covered, so we need a refund and a new dentist, sigh). Post-lunch, my afternoon was filled with general decompression. I tried out and culled a few audiobooks while working on a puzzle. Did a bit of cleaning around the house. Watched a crap TV show on my phone. Played with the cats before they settled down for afternoon sleepy time.

3:25 pm – Laurence finished his day of virtual school, and the two of us drove down to Dunkin Donuts for our weekly outing. He got a frozen hot chocolate, and I got a free iced coffee from my rewards program. Of course, I meant to get some stuffed bagels, too, because I LOVE those, but I was so focused on pulling up the various loyalty scans on my phone that I completely forgot until after I’d paid for Laurence’s drink! So I made my own toasted bagel with cream cheese at home. Not quite as good as Dunkin’s, but still satisfying. I ate/drank while semi-watching Ambrose and Laurence play Mario Kart, and then re-entered that general miscellaneous period. Still with one eye on Mario Kart, I signed up for a virtual 5K that benefits the ASPCA, scheduled some hikes to host for my meetup group, folded some clean towels, went through the mail, texted with Morrigan, talked with Jason after he finished his day at work, etc. Afternoons are generally pretty unstructured around here.

5:45 pm – Food prep. Jason did the cooking tonight (sausage and egg breakfast tacos) but I toasted my tortillas and make myself a bowl of strawberries to go alongside. The boys were hyper-focused on some downloadable video game connection thingy, so we didn’t end up having a true family dinner tonight like we usually do. And I believe that despite telling the boys that they needed to get some fruit to go with their tacos half a dozen times, they never bothered. I couldn’t be bothered to continue chasing them, tbh.

6:12 pm – The weekday San Antonio covid news brief came on and I watched that in real time. It was pretty short, and afterwards, Jason and I stood up eggs for the fall equinox. I’ve been doing this since I was 17, and while I know that you can do this any day of the year, it’s become a tradition. As a teen, my ex-boyfriend told me that this was only possible on the two equinoxes, something to do with air pressure changing as the earth tilt was in balance, or some such nonsense. I believed him back when I was young and naive, and while I’ve long grown out of said belief, it’s always fun to stand eggs! My boys are too jaded to do it this year though, heh, and too interested in that video game connection thingy that they never got working. My egg stood up pretty quick and easy, though it didn’t stay up long since Gavroche walked by and nudged it. After that, I went through the traumatizing process of my weekly injection (I still hate doing this no matter how many times I have to or how painless it is!), and then spent a bit recovering from the anxiety about said injection. It helped that a Polo from my sister arrived with video of her new foster kitten!!

7:00 pm – Jason and I worked on various paperwork stuff that got neglected over the weekend (bills, budget, health claims, etc), plus scheduling with an inspector to come look at the deck posts that we know were done wrong grr. Morrigan FaceTimed us in the middle of this, so we called back afterwards and chatted with him for about an hour. (I had the sudden realization during this call that Morrigan is less than a month from his 20th birthday, which makes him the same age as Jason when we got married. I was a few months shy of 21 at the time. It’s an interesting change in perspective – especially knowing that I got pregnant a month after our wedding, right after Jason’s 20th birthday. I can see a lot better now why people worried about us…)

8:23 pm – Winding down. I put my legs up vertical for a bit to help circulation after a heavy exercise day. Then it was time to feed the cats, clean the kitchen, change into pajamas, and get ready for bed. I like to be lights out by 9ish, my flower lights on and my phone put away, so that I can relax into sleep over the next hour. With an insomnia disorder, it’s helpful to have a sleep ritual, and this is mine. After lights-out, Jason and I discussed today’s Rhythm of War chapter while he scrubbed my back until I got sleepy. At that point, I snuggled under my weighted blanket with The Whisper Man and read a few chapters before falling asleep around 10:30.

*****
Don’t I live an exciting life? Heh. I suppose I could have chosen a day when we had more appointments scheduled or something, but this is kind of just how it goes in my household. When everyone is away at work/school, things are far more structured and I have a rhythm to my day until people start to get home in the late afternoon. But under quarantine homebound life, it’s “clean here, eat here, grab a few minutes for messing around,” all of us existing in a fluctuating rotation. I miss having more order to things, but we adapt to what’s necessary, and right now, staying home and safe is the necessary. Anyway. That’s my quarantine life. Hope you enjoyed the internal look at a housewife’s boring day, ha!