Meet Bumpy

This is Bumpy

[Note: I wrote this when it happened back in October, but never posted it.]

Mothering boys is an adventure. Life is bigger, louder, faster, and messier than I ever thought it could be. But every now and again, things get very quiet, very small, and very slow ... even if only for an afternoon. That happened to us last Tuesday.

On Monday, we discovered that a woodpecker had gotten stuck in our garage. He kept flying from vertical perch to vertical perch as close to the ceiling as he could get, and each time he crossed the garage he bumped his head on the ceiling. So my boys started calling him Bumpy.

Life's Little Interruptions

Working from home can be interesting. Particularly on days when the kids are home from school. My husband was supposed to be home from a business trip last night and take off today, but the trip was unexpectedly extended. I didn't send the kids to a friend's house for babysitting because Joshua was too tired this morning.

What now?

Well, deadlines don't change because of business trips and tired kids, so I press on. I thought I would keep a list today of the little things that interrupted my work day. I've never done this before, so it could be interesting. Or boring. Or funny. Or depressing. But you never know until you start.

Ready.
Set.
Go!

Barriers to Entry

If you've ever studied business, you know that one of the things to consider when evaluating a business opportunity is the presence of barriers to entry. The term refers to what possible obstacles stand in the way of the business getting off the ground or gaining market share.

• Is the industry heavily regulated? Big barrier to entry.
• Is there a large financial investment necessary up front for equipment, land, people, etc.? Another barrier to entry.
• Are there already several established, dominant players in the market who could squash you like a bug? (Think John Deere, Microsoft, or Coke.) Yep...another barrier to entry.
• Or do you just need a lawnmower, edger, and a few flyers to put in people's mailboxes? Low barrier to entry.

Some of the barriers to entry aren't physical or financial ... they're mental. And they can be the biggest, hardest ones to overcome.  Those voices inside your head can be pretty loud.

And for me, I can be my own barrier to entry. You see, I'm a list maker. I can procrastinate just about anything away and blame it on a to do list of things that "had" to be done first, before I could even start.

A friend of mine (I use the term loosely ... we've met twice), Jon Acuff, is inspiring me to get over waiting for the perfect moment and simply jump at the first moment. This moment. Because this moment will never come again. And the perfect moment may never come at all.

Sunday Confessional: I'm an Adult Underachiever

"Hi. My name is Marybeth. And I'm an adult underachiever."

"Hi, Marybeth." (You know you thought it, even if you didn't say it.)

If you're reading this, there's a good chance that you know me personally. That's because right now, there aren't a lot of people who read my blog who don't share my last name or DNA.

So if you know me ... if you know my life ... you probably have no idea why I see myself as an underachiever.
 
I'm a wife and mother of four boys. (Many people probably think I should stop there. I truly believe there is a special place in heaven for the mother of boys. It is quiet and clean and full of breakable things and scented candles.)

From Finishing to Halftime

When I started my blog, I called it "Finish Well" because I realized that I'm a great starter and a sucky finisher. I had a gillion unfinished projects and books, and I thought that talking about them publicly might shame me into completing a few.

What I didn't even really consider is why I felt compelled to do this. Was it really just a pile of unfinished books and a cross-stitch Christmas stocking that's been eight years in the making? Or was there something more?

Then I realized it. I'm going through my midlife crisis.

I didn't recognize it, because it didn't look anything like what I thought a midlife crisis should look like.

I didn't buy a little red Corvette. (Though I'll take one if anyone's offering).

I didn't have an affair. (I'm sure Herb is glad to hear that one.)

I didn't have a nervous breakdown. (I have a little, tiny one every day, so no need to go overboard.)

My kids weren't all grown and out of the house. (That's about 12 more years away.)

But apparently the phenomenon isn't all that unusual. After all, Time magazine did a cover article about it in 2005.  (Click here to read it.)

Helping a Pet Finish Well

As a human, created in the image of God, we have an idea of what it's like to finish a life well.

I love my spouse well and support him in achieving his goals and fulfill his calling — whatever that looks like for him.

I prepare my children well for adulthood, help them to utilize their God-given talents to the best of their abilities, and make sure them know that they are always loved and valued by their Mom — especially when it seems I'm the only one.

I've always said that I wanted to leave the world a better place because I was in it through the touched lives of the people I leave behind.

What does it mean to finish well ... if you're a pet?

My Facebook Fast

I picked a sucky month to abstain from Facebook.

A really, really, REALLY sucky month.

The Olympics are going on, and I can't post about my very favorite Olympics moment of all time: when Keri Strugg's coach Bela Karolyi carried her to the podium after she tore two ligaments in her leg during her gold medal vault. (So instead, I'll post it here. Ha! Victory.) 

And I wasn't able to check in on Chick-fil-a Appreciation Day. (I was at the location at The Avenues in Cumming with Sandy around 8:30 p.m. in case you care.)

Baby Steps (Or How an ADHD Mom Cleans Up)

I don't know about you, but when I look at a task as large as cleaning out my office, I get scared.

Curl up in a ball ... sucking my thumb (ok, maybe a margarita, not my thumb) ... tapping my heels together, wishing to go back to Kansas scared.

I'm a self-diagnosed, unmedicated ADD Mom (but with none of that cool "H").  "Focus...Focus...Focus...Look, there's a birdie!" is my modus operandi. So if I'm going to do something big .... like cleaning my office (click here for the "before" post so you'll know exactly what I'm talking about) ... I have to break it up into bite-sized pieces. And I have to have goals I care about. The combination of relatively small tasks and goals that matter to me are invaluable.

It Is Finished: Hours 15-0

OK, so my plan to blog daily about cleaning up my office didn't happen.

But the clean office did!

Here's some before photos, just to remind you from whence I came...

Ugh. That hurts just to look at. And to think I lived this way on and off for years! Yeah, I'd clean it up every now and again, but it was never really down to the roots clean. It was more flat-ironing the top layer while leaving all the kinky curly stuff hidden underneath.

But here's the reveal....

Lost and Found: Hours 18 to 15

OK. The great office clean-up started today. You saw the before pictures yesterday. If you missed them, click here to see my gosh-awful mess.

But wait! I still have before and after picture for you, so hold onto your knickers.

Just in case you have your own little shop of horrors in your house, each day I'm going to go over what I did, step by step. Today's tasks, in order:

1. Take all baskets, boxes, and other containers of "stuff" out of my room and into the dining room.
2. Remove all random piles of paper from the floor and move them into the dining room. Return things to their homes on the bookshelves if they have migrated to the floor. 
3. Remove everything else from the floor that isn't nailed down or a major piece of furniture. Put it in the dining room.
4. Clear off all horizontal surfaces and put the papers, etc., in plastic bins to sort through later. Put bins in the dining room. (Yes, I know this is how I've gotten off-track in the past. But this time I'm actually going to sort through the bins, laundry baskets, and other boxes. None of them may re-enter the office.)
5. Thoroughly clean the desk area. Vacuum, then mop the floor. (Note: Even though Izabel comes and cleans our house once every two weeks, it's been literally months since my office has been cleaned. I banned her from the room ages ago because there was nothing ... literally nothing ... she could do.)
6. Choose a new rug for my newly cleaned floor from the lovely ones donated to the cause by my friends. Thank you Gina and Jackie!
7. Sit back and bask in the glow.

Do you notice a theme here? Everything moved out of my office and into the dining room. So here are my before and after pictures for the day.

T Minus 18 Hours

18 hours.

Three hours a day for six days.

That's how much time I have set aside over the next week to clean my office. Seems like a lot, doesn't it? Well, if it does, then you haven't seen my office.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here are some "before" photos...

This is what you see when you first enter my office. That pink thing all covered with stuff is a large chair. I bought this chair when my 14yo Sandy was a toddler, and it used to reside in my bedroom back when I was a single mom and it was just the two of us. It's where I would sit and do my quiet times in the evening after he went to bed. It is where we'd snuggle and read. It's the chair we would sit and watch VeggieTales when he woke during the night with a fever of 103, waiting for the Motrin to kick in.

Ur Gramr Sux

OK, so this has nothing to do with Finishing anything, but I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how we are becoming a nation of grammatical slackers. Maybe it's just because I was an English minor...maybe it's just because I planned to be a journalist when I grew up...or maybe it's just because my parents were a teacher (Mom) and a journalist then lawyer (Dad), but I grew up not only knowing good grammar, but also knowing the importance of it.

Let me say this once and loudly: Most prospective employers, particularly of professional or service-oriented businesses, will not take you seriously if you cannot write a respectful, grammatically correct cover letter and resume. 

Or at least that's what I used to think.

Reclaiming My Mornings

I'm on vacation right now. I'm spending three weeks of my summer in Maine visiting my husband's home state and many of his relatives. It's kind of a last hurrah because his parents are selling their house here to move closer to us.

Side note: Apparently, Maine ... as a state ... has a short attention span. On the day before the first day of summer, it was about 75 degrees. NOT summer, by my Hotlanta standards. Then, on June 20 ... the first day of summer ... whoa, Nelly! It was 91 degrees. We had three ... count 'em THREE ... days of 80+ degree weather before spring returned and I put on sweaters again. My father-in-law tells the story of a visitor to his medical office who asked a nurse what "Mainers" do in the summer. Her response: "Well, if it happens on a weekend, we have a picnic." Our summer long-weekend happened on a Wednesday - Friday, but we managed to have a picnic anyway.

OK. Back to my purpose in writing this.

I may be on vacation, but I am already dreaming of getting home. Why? Because I'm going to make some fundamental changes about how I spend my time.

You may be asking, "Why, pray tell, would you do that?"

Well, thank you for asking. Because I feel guilty as all get-out. I just finished a teeny-tiny Kindle book called What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. It took all of about two hours to read ... and frankly would have taken less than that if I'd read it in a single sitting ... but it's got my mind churning about all of the time I waste. In a day. In a week. In a year. In the last 40 years.

Another Thing I'll Never Finish?

I bought a book.

I know, I know. This year is all about finishing things I've already started. Like the pile of books on my bedside table. Remember from my original post when I started this blog, I had no fewer than ten books on my bedside table that I had started and not finished.  (Read that post by clicking here.)

So I swore off buying books until I had made a dent in all of those unfinished books I already had. So I chose 12 books to finish this year. Below, I'll list them. But for the moment, let me tell you about the book I bought.

This one is worth breaking the rules.

7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker

The Best 15 Minutes of My Day

A while ago, I got an email from my father-in-law. Let me start by saying that he is a wonderfully sweet man, who has a great way of giving me advice without it necessarily sounding like advice.

In response to an earlier post about my dirty little "mail" secret (read "Putting 2011 On the Shelf" for my confession), he shared this story from when he was a cardiologist in private practice...

Relevant to your blog, the problem (not your problem,  but the problem) is  that there are only 168 hours in a week, that is 10,080 minutes. When I was working 60-80 hours per week I learned how to make "concessions to reality" and was frequently called upon by our  office staff to do a procedure or take care of something that one or two of my inefficient partners could not complete because they knew I would and could do it. I learned how to work efficiently and make use of small bites of time.  I also do that in our home where I am CEO of domestic engineering, shipping and packing and use 5-10 minute intervals to accomplish small segments of these mindless, but vital, chores.

At the time, I didn't pay much attention to those words. But today, they conspired to change the way I look at time.

I'm Finished with Parenting...Sort Of

It never really occurred to me how much my lack of "finish" ability would affect my children. At least, not seriously in the life-altering kind of way.

• Joshua and Jordan have survived without a handmade Christmas stocking like the ones his older brothers have. And they will continue to love Christmas whether they get one or not.
• They don't even know their baby books aren't finished (or, in Jordan's case, started).
• Sandy's baby pictures made it into boxes in chronological order. The albums, however, are empty.
• Their clothes that need mending are in piles in my closet. Actually, shoved in corners so I don't feel guilty for not taking care of it. 
• And do any of them really care if I ever finish Sense and Sensibility? Honestly, the older two would probably rather I didn't. Then there's much less chance I'd ever expect them to.

However, as I've been realizing lately, being a bad finisher is making me a fairly poor parent.

Putting 2011 on the Shelf

Today was quite an embarrassing day.

In his quest to find our son's missing Tiger Cub Scout handbook, my husband actually went through my mail basket. You probably have one or something like it. You know, the place where you dump all the mail you're going to come back to. The stuff you need to deal with ... later ... just not now. 

Confession: I never finish going through the mail. I say I'm going to do it later, but later never comes. At least not without the calendar turning a few pages first.

Needless to say, he was rightly appalled by what he found in there.

My Finish List: The Reveal

I'm more than a little nervous about posting this. Putting something in writing is one thing.

Publishing it is entirely different.

I haven't shown my Finish List to anyone — not even my husband. Not that I've been hiding it. I just wasn't sure it was finished, and I didn't want to show it to him until it was.

See? I'm already finishing things! I finished my Finish List. 

So putting my list out there for everyone to see - OK, the three of you who will click on the link, including my husband and sister - is really daunting. That's an increase in awareness of 300% over the public's current level of awareness of my Finish List. That's huge! Enormous! Corporations and political candidates pay big money for that kind of return.

So here are the rules I set for myself for creating my Finish List:

1. Goals must be concrete and measurable. No "I'm going to lose weight" wishy-washiness. Example: "I'm going lose ten pounds."
2. Goals must have a deadline either explicitly or implicitly attached to them. Example: "I'm going to lose ten pounds by the end of May."
3. Goals, whenever possible, should be broken down into smaller sub-goals. This allows me to track progress and see if a correction needs to be made. Example: I'm going to lose two pounds by the end of February and ten pounds by the end of May."
4. Goals must have the word "finish" in them. Try it. It's harder to do than you think. Example: "I'm going to finish losing two pounds by the end of February and ten pounds by the end of May." 
5. Set goals that affect multiple aspects of life. Personal and professional, spiritual and physical, individual and family. Example: See actual list below.

From Start to Finish

I'm the consummate starter.

In fact, I'm fabulous at starting. I can start anything I set my mind to, whether or not I have the skill, strength, or knowledge to do so. If you need something started, I'm your girl. Whether it's reading a book or writing one, I start so many things that I literally can't keep track.

But I finish like crap.

Case in point: My bedside table. On it are:

• 10 books I have started and not finished. This is not all of them, mind you. Just the ones on top of my bedside table.
• A journal I started writing in January 2005. Don't you think that seven years is enough time to fill up a journal? It's really not that big. I mean, not enough to hold Gone with the Wind or Atlas Shrugged or anything.
• A book on organization, organized into weekly tasks, that I bought 14 months ago. I got bogged down by week 1 and did not continue. It is NOT included in the "unfinished book" count above.
• A bottle of hand lotion I've had for three years. Seriously? I can't even finish a bottle of hand lotion in three years?
• A bottle of water I started three days ago. At least. 
• A magazine of logic puzzles I bought a couple of months ago. I love logic puzzles. Buying it was "starting" ... actually doing one is another issue.