March. Year 2016.

Night. The 9 month old wakes up at 1 in the morning. Then at 3. Then around 4.30 and refuses to go back to bed on his own. He's teething and miserable and the only way he calms down and snoozes is if I hold him tight and close to my body, with his head slightly elevated. Von Zobel needs some sleep- it's tax season and he works on Saturdays - so I swirl myself into a pretzel-asana in the chair, manage to fix the iPad on the chair arm with my right knee, so I can flip through it with my left hand, so I can hold the baby on my right shoulder-elbow-side, and lean in such a way so that in the next two hours I do not accidentally fall asleep myself and wake him up.

Morning. Following a large breakfast of fried eggs (aka OVAL! - Chinchilla Sr) with onion and turkey breast, bread and fruit,  and weekly call-around for grandparents and grand-grannies chinchillas demand entertainment. We walk to the remote playground, the Vice-president of our house riding in a sport stroller, the president - walking along upset for not being allowed to take his bicycle, tricycle or a van with him. I really hope that on the playground I can exhaust both of them and get some study time during their long nap.

Afternoon. The long walk brought Chinchillas some very good appetite, but - alas! - no sleepiness. Chinchilla Jr. skipped the morning nap altogether, and is now misanthropic and miserable. I spend another 30 minutes with him in my arms before he finally falls asleep, still jerking in sleep from my slightest movement while I try to put him in bed. Meanwhile Chinchilla Sr has already sung all his lullabies to himself, dropped out all his books from the bed and is now standing in bed demanding bathroom break. Ok, looks like he needed one. I put him back in bed hoping he can nap now. Go back to my bedroom as he continues to mumble and whine. Before I complete my first testlet though I hear him scream at the top of his lungs, rush to his room and find him on the floor by his bed. That's the first time ever he fell out of his bed. His screaming wakes up Chill Jr.

Evening. Chinchillas are exhausted, feeding or bathing them becomes a challenge. Junior gets a portion of Tylenol, I keep my fingers crossed that it works for him better than last night (when nothing worked at all). Takes some time to put him to sleep. Takes some time to put Chill Senior to bed - he can't go on, but is upset on the actual fact of being put to bed; however he seems to have passed out a minute after I closed the door of his room behind me.
I can come back to my testlet now.

Night. Sometime between passing out as soon as my head touches the pillow and Chinchilla senior waking me up at 5 again for a drink of milk, I find myself at a strange place. More like an ugly huge arena with an ugly outdated amusement park inside, and grey tall ugly Soviet-style houses with dark windows behind its walls. I'm with a group of people, knowing I need to get out of this place, because I need to get to my exam, but no one has any idea where the exit is. As we wander around the non-working rides, old garages and some other weird constructions an announcement is made that there're terrorists inside with us, getting ready to blow up this whole place very soon. Of course, I have to make it to the exam and other have some.. plans for the rest of their lives, so we divide ourselves and start running and searching for terrorists trying to catch them.
El sueño de la razón produce monstrous (c). Again :)

Love the exam multiple-choice questions that are available on... different sources:

 

That would be a challenging question on the exam. Reasonably foreseeable, huh?

 

 

 

And this sounds somewhat outdated :) I wonder when the questions were last updated...

A day ago I got dragged into a quick online comment exchange with two young ladies on - and that's scary - a woman's determinism and purpose in life. Other people's ideas on what a woman's life should be like and what her - thus mine - purpose in life should be, do occasionally reach me, but apparently last time they did was a while ago and reading this again yesterday soured my day a little.
The girls jumped in to reply to one of my comments on the importance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance as woman becomes mother, wrote a few long comments full of irrelevant thoughts, random accusations of being a selfish money-loving child-neglecting control-freak (not necessarily in this order!), threw in a couple of examples that would prove my point rather than theirs, and continued to rant about the outrageousness of women like me long after I retired from the conversation :)

Every time I have somebody approach me with a persistent advice on how I should immediately change my life so my family benefits from it, I facepalm myself.  In my mind, if it is absolutely necessary that I do not appear rude. And while on the World Wide Web it is easier to ignore a well-wishing comment than to start explaining my views to every random person, the though of how many of such people are out there makes me want to facepalm myself anyway.

I get quite emotional over the idea that being a wife and mother  (TM) - means devoting all your life to the needs of your family - is the only true and natural way for a woman to live her life. Has it been perfectly natural for women of the past few centuries to take full and complete care of their babies from birth to age 3? Absolutely! I can easily picture a peasant girl in her late teens, who delivers a baby in Western Europe some 300 years ago and receives a paid maternity leave right away! Or a female factory worker a century and a half ago, a single mother with no relatives in town, who is of course entitled for maternity benefits form both the government and the plant she works at so she could stay home with her baby, and take care of him. Yep, for the next 3 years! Or - on the other hand - a Victorian upper middle class mother would surely stay with her baby daughter day and night, and as her daughter grows up - her mother would be able to cook meals for her from the scratch, go for walks with her, teach her painting, French, horseback riding, dancing, good manner and read her books  - all by herself, of course! Nothing more natural than the history of mothers being attached to their babies from birth until and being multi-functional at all times.

Another concept I could never fully embrace is - what exactly a mother with no life of her own can pass on to her kids? Being a stay at home Mom of 4 kids looks great on Instagram , but what if it did happen to me and I ended in a... career, social and personal interest isolation for a while - what would I be able to teach my kids about the world around, about problem solving and importance of social bonds forming? How would I be able to train them on the skills I no longer had myself? How would I be able to tell them right from wrong in their teenage years if hadn't expressed my own opinion for years, teach them to persist in getting what they want if I forgot what it means to stand my ground, show them the benefit of creative thinking when I life in a Groundhog's day, advise on applying their skills and knowledge if I never used what I had studied in University? And - that's irrelevant to me now, but what if I had a daughter? What behavioral model would she soak up watching me?

Lucky are those women who get all the support from  their family, friends and peers to continue moving in the direction that suits them best. Otherwise, making yourself ignore dozens of discouraging and disorienting voices coming from all around may eat up a good portion of the energy that could otherwise be spent on just moving ahead quicker.

Love cleaning my laptop.

Turns out I had quite a buildup of PDF presentations dated almost a decade ago of various beautiful cities and places of out planet to visit - quite a few of which I've already visited (hello, proper goal setting!), PDF presentations received from someone full of "words of wisdom" that have never really been applicable to me, nor will they in the near future (esp. in the light of recent... life philosophy change), a bunch New Year and Birthday wishes (I've no idea who wrote some of those, and can't recognize the style), a stack of documents with some interesting facts or words (which are always so hard to get rid of... esp. for a girl who grew up reading encyclopedias for fun).

A special type of importance for me once must have been:

•  a presentation full of Geneva pictures (all of them apparently taking in a rush, and looking ridiculous now - it's easier to go to Geneva again some time soon and take some nice and meaningful pictures!),
• a study of... Ancient Egyptian (ok, I'm still an Egyptologist deep down my heart. Had to keep this one),
• a document titled "URGENT - to finish" - completely blank inside :)  (I guess I should have finished URGENTLY when I had a clue what it was about. Or at least started it :) )

Some documents, often coming from a folder with a proper title Pubelle are even amusing:

So, what does work for time management?

So much for being... a  bit less than tolerant to people who waste time :)  Now that my life is quite unpredictable - or let's refer to things by their names - my life is in nearly complete chaos - the mindset that has been helping me recently to squeeze out more from the 24 hours is thinking about the next task while still completing the current one.

This does not necessarily relate to the work or study projects where complete concentration is required, in fact, I'd rather allot some time blocks for anything that would require me to "dive in" and then not be interrupted for anything else. But when moving through routine tasks, running errands, following up with people and getting from one place to another it helps immensely not to let myself get suck in the present moment. Having started with an Item #1 on my list that does not require my full 100% focus, I start thinking about Item#2 - the next thing I should be doing or the next place I should be at, also finding the best way to get through the next thing quicker and move on to Item #3 etc. The next few items on the to-do list are thus rolling over constantly in my head, reminding me of all the upcoming deadlines and pushing me to move on quicker. The second benefit of this method is that it helps perfecting the execution  since, as I think about the next Items on my list over and over again, I find better ways to approach them, combine similar tasks and do them all at once, or get rid of some steps of a big project altogether.

What are the cons of this approach? Pretty much that while it is very pro-active in execution, it requires prior planning. Before I start mapping out in my head in 20minutes, and in another 20minutes, I need a clear list of all 7 places I need to stop by/visit - all on paper, any notes to be taken into consideration about them - all on paper. Any project should be penciled down step by step, and should circumstances change or another person get involved - it should all be added to the original plan before any actions on the amended plan are taken. Sometimes a to-do item or a small project comes up and I write it down without a slightest idea of how to approach it or when to find time for it - and it will get done timely.

Sound easy and banal? It is. Plain pen and paper, and lots of self-discipline and thinking outside the box. But just as efficient given where I am in my life now. I keep reminding myself that as soon as I reach all my biggest life goals I will definitely hire a PA :)