For most of my adult life, I’ve been a creature of habit. It’s hard to tell these days though.
Since the accident, creating and sticking to a routine has been hard for me. For one, my pain levels vary from day to day. I also have a handful of other health problems and between the two, it greatly affects how I sleep at night and how I feel each day. I rarely sleep more than four hours at a time and end up having to nap during the day to make up for it.
Now before you think, “oh, well, if you didn’t nap, you might sleep longer at night”, understand a few things. One, I’ve had insomnia my entire life and my “norm” for a good night’s sleep, pre-accident, was around six hours. Nap or no nap. Didn’t matter my age, sleeping habits, caffeine intake, the state of my bedroom, my before bed habits or anything else. In perfect conditions, I rarely slept more than six hours at any one time.
Since the accident, on the extremely rare occasion that I sleep more than four hours at any given time, I wake up in so much pain that I end up wishing I hadn’t slept that long anyway. Around the four-hour mark, I’m already stiff and sore when I wake up and it takes me a good ten minutes to be able to actually get my body to a point where I feel that I can safely move from the bed to the wheelchair. Keep in mind, that that is considered a “good day” and that most days aren’t “good days”.
Another factor that affects my ability to stick to a routine since the accident is living with people on multiple shifts. At the moment, Draco works what they call a “mid-shift”, from 11 am to 7 pm (although we’re trying to get that changed now that his boss is headed back from vacation. Chicklet, on the other hand, works from either 6 pm or 7 pm until close which varies between her getting home either around 2 am or 3 am and she’s a night owl, so she usually doesn’t get into bed and sleeping until around 7 or 8 am, a few hours before I’m getting up.
My entire adult life, I had a strong Morning Routine in place. That was when most of my day actually happened. I’d get up, go to the bathroom, get dressed for the day, start the coffee pot, wash any dishes from the night before (Draco worked night shift most of our marriage and we eat dinner really late, so I don’t always clean the kitchen at night before bed, although I do wash dishes as I’m cooking, put up leftovers and try to make sure anything that hasn’t been washed is rinsed and stacked for the next morning) and start laundry. Then, I’d take care of whatever other housework I had planned for that day. Dusting, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, etc.
Now, with Chicklet not getting in bed until 7 or 8 am, I find myself putting off things that I think might disturb her sleep. Her bedroom is at the end of the house closest to the kitchen, the washer and dryer are basically about six feet from her bed and she sleeps with her door open.
She has told me on numerous occasions to do what I have to do and not worry about waking her up but she works and needs her sleep and after a few weeks of glancing in her room as I moved through my chores to see her eyes open and her looking at me, I felt that it was rude, so I stopped.
By the time she gets up, I’m usually running out of steam from not sleeping much at night and I need to lay down and by the time I get up, Draco is coming home from work.
So things aren’t getting done as often as they need to be. I still wash the dishes in the morning and start my laundry (luckily our washer and dryer are rather quiet when they run), but things like vacuuming are getting put on hold to another time of day that never seems to come.
I’m struggling to try to figure out what to do. No matter how clean some things seem to be, when I can look at my kitchen floor and see that it desperately needs to be vacuumed and mopped, I don’t feel like my house is really “clean” and I get discouraged.
There’s also the fact that we still have carpet in the living room and our bedroom and the carpet is completely destroyed and needs to come up and be replaced with tile or linoleum, and the vacuum that I have to use for it (the small vacuum I use in the kitchen that is light-weight enough even for me to use from my chair isn’t strong enough for carpets when you have eight dogs in the house) is really too large, awkward and heavy for me and with both of them working, it’s often hard to get either of them to help me with it.
These things sound small, but in my mind, they’re a huge deal.
I’m considering going back to sweeping again instead of the vacuum, but with eight dogs come a good bit of dog hair, as you can imagine, and I have a window air conditioner and a large fan in the kitchen that really makes sweeping a challenge because they blow all the dog back around the room while you’re trying to sweep it up. Also, the broom is a little more complicated from my wheelchair than you might imagine since I have to be able to take my swept up mess with me as I move through the laundry room and kitchen and maneuver around it with my wheelchair.
I think since we rearranged the kitchen last week to accommodate me cooking and cleaning from my wheelchair that I might give sweeping one more shot and see how it goes.
This weekend, I think I’m going to try to work on getting some doable routines set up and try to implement them next week.
Do you have regular routines that you follow or are you more of a seat-of-the-pants person? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
The Domestic Pagan 