Eating breakfast with M. On the weekends, we cook up a big batch of black beans with sweet potatoes, onion, and sriracha, and we eat it for breakfast with a little bit of cheese over some cooked farro, along with a fruit-smoothie. M almost always has some of my beans and farro and some of my smoothie, too. Yum!
This article was going around a few days ago, and boy did I ever relate. The thing is, A really does quite a lot around the house, and is seriously such a wonderful partner in parenting. But even despite that, we end up in a situation where I’m almost always doing M-stuff while he does other house stuff. And it gets really old. And it’s not really anybody’s fault, it just comes down to two things: like they mention in the article, I *am* more tuned in to emotional stuff and notice M’s needs more quickly (this is just part of my personality, not even M-specific), and M is simply very mama-centric. If A and I are both home, she wants to be with ME, not daddy, pretty much always.
So our morning routine looks like this:
6:40am: alarm goes off, A gets M out of her bed and brings her to our bed for morning nursies, then gets in the shower
until ~7:10am: While A showers/gets dressed/etc, I nurse M, help her with the potty/diaper change, help her choose clothes and get dressed, read a book if there’s time
7:10-7:40am: I take my shower, but M stays in the bathroom with me to “watch” (which usually means getting everything out of drawers and yelling at me to “be done!” – so relaxing!!), so A makes his coffee and starts prepping breakfasts/lunches
7:40am-8:00am: I eat breakfast with M while A finishes up the various meal-prep things he does in the morning, which means I typically deal with all of M’s food-throwing, fork-dropping, mess-making, demanding things that she doesn’t actually want antics. I’m getting better at this, but it’s still frazzling.
8:00am-8:15am: I pack M’s diaper bag while she finishes her breakfast (she always takes longer than me), then change her diaper again for school, and dry my hair/brush my teeth while she “watches” and “helps” again. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what A does during this time – probably washes the dishes from the meal prep? Oh, and he also gives our cat Stimpy his medicine.
8:15am-8:20am: everyone gets bundled up for work/school
8:20am-dropoff: A drives, I pass back pieces of clif bar and otherwise interact with M on the way. I carry her into the school if she doesn’t want to walk.
I get to my desk in the morning and I’m already kinda fried. And after work/school is more of the same – I hang out with M while A does cat-feeding, dinner-prep, etc. It’s not like he isn’t working hard – my goodness, he does nearly all of the housework these days! He’s absolutely doing more than a lot of spouses that I know. I’m very lucky. It’s just – gosh, doing meal-prep without a toddler clinging to me yelling at me to “be done!” would be really, really nice sometimes. I miss chopping veggies! I actually kind of like doing dishes! Life is weird.
whit::knits 
Si used to hang out in the bathroom while I got ready on weekdays and I just couldn’t handle it any longer. (Weekends are a different story) I put my foot down (hard, heh) and he protested A LOT, but now, he has a routine with helping Aaron in the kitchen in the morning and it seems to work. He’s not thrilled, but it makes my life better :) Mornings are hard!
Yeah, I think I am going to have to start putting my foot down about it – being yelled at to “be done!” the whole time I’m in the shower is just driving me crazy, and it’s not like I can do much about it because I’m soaking wet and blind without my glasses. I bet we’ll have to get up earlier to make that work, though, because I can’t imagine that A will be able to do his kitchen work as efficiently with M running around as he can while she’s shut in the bathroom with me!
Can you guys prep the night before? You know I’m ALL ABOUT nighttime prep. Haha. Lunches & diaper bag? Boom. You just bought yourselves 20 mins in the morning.
I keep meaning to try doing this! I think we’d have better luck with some of the next-night’s-dinner prep than lunches, really – mostly because I tend to eat things like PB&J and apple slices that just don’t keep well overnight. But slicing up onions for the next night’s soup, or whatever, that we could totally do.
And the reason we do her diaper bag the morning of is because of our cloth diaper washing situation – we wash/dry them overnight, so *usually* we don’t quite have enough, on a diaper-washing night, to pack a bag for the next day. But actually, she’s going through fewer diapers these days (I think we’re getting close to potty-learning time) so maybe we could!
Showers are a sacred time here. On the weekends, it’s understood that you do not interrupt an adult’s shower unless someone is on fire or bleeding. So, yeah. No kids allowed in the bathroom. During the week, I get up before J. But, when I was pregnant and going in at the same time as J, he would wake up a little earlier than usual, shower while I got Celia dressed, then he would take over and keep her busy while I showered. This way, we still had our time in the morning to get out thoughts together, you know?
Anyways, maybe something to think about.
Also, I think it’s awesome that he helps out so much around the house. I do most of the cooking because I genuinely enjoy it, and because J knows like 3 recipes, all of them involving a burrito of some sort. Hah.
Yeah, it is really great that A helps out so much. He’s 5 years older than I am, and when we got married, he’d lived on his own for awhile, whereas I was coming right out of college dorm life, pretty much, so he actually knew more about cooking than I did. Not that either of us knew very much! I joke that everything we know about cooking we learned by watching Good Eats, but it’s kinda true :)
I’m all about the night-before prep, too. Lunches, bag, anything special that needs to go to school. I either shower the night before or get up before L to shower–he stays in his room when I’m in the shower, awake or not. Then I get him dressed, then breakfast, which is a simple, no-cooking affair–yogurt, soymilk, cereal, fruit, etc. Pre-bought protein shake for me. And then I take him to school! I’ve been doing it solo for 2 years now, so we’ve got to be efficient. Some mornings are trickier than others, but at least he knows the drill by now. Hugs, though–it is never easy, and yes, chopping vegetables in quiet solitude sounds luxurious, right??