Thank you so much for all of your prayers about my sciatic nerve pain. My nerve pain is much better.
The best thing about the pain is that it forces me to completely reorganize my life. My first project is to teach myself on how to move without further injuring my back. I'm so uncoordinated. In my life as a stay-at-home mom, I basically have the same physical demands as field hand. There is so much bending over to pick up legos off the the floor and a constant lifting of of a 30 pound 3 year old and a 55 pound 5 year old. Every time I unload the dishwasher, I've got to coach myself through the motions, "Bend at the knee, keep your back straight, no sudden twists or turns." It feels totally foreign to me, but I'm so glad to be learning this at 35 instead of 55.
Then there is this great emotional task called "letting the house go." I literally can't pick up all the blocks, and the train sets and the legos that get on the living room floor everyday. The constant up and down motion that "picking up" requires is murder on my sore back. For the past two weeks, either someone else (my husband or my kids) pick up things up or the toys just stay there for days. Every morning I sit at breakfast and am amazed that all of Mimi's wooden blocks are still under the coffee table! There is almost no spots of uncluttered carpet left in my apartment.
This type of "letting things go" is so good for me. Dinner and clean clothes come ahead of an immaculate living room. Its so good that before my newborn comes I'm forced to see that the family can totally survive on what I consider to be "bare-bones" housework. Hopefully, this will help me not get so overwhelmed in the Fall.
Thanks to my back pain, my revised plan for September is "breastfeeding and crock pot dinners." Everything else, home-schooling, house cleaning and laundry is going to wait for Daddy's Domestic Time on Saturday Morning. Glad to get a head start on life with "four" before the baby's arrival.
