Bat vs. Bee

I don't much like bats. I don't know that I've ever seen a bat in MN, though I'm sure they are here, but I used to see them all the time in NC. The sun would start to set and they'd come out and fly around in their little erratic swoops and dives. Once one of them dove a little too close to my horse at the end of one of my lessons and I ended up getting pitched over the horse's head, and yeah, I don't much like bats.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, except we took it in a cave in Panama, and there were a lot of bats.

Our summer has been a little haywire, a little "batty", if you will, and I'm trying to flow with all the swooping and diving and I'm just ending up flat on my back a lot of the time.

 I don't know if it was the wisdom teeth surgery or what, but my personal rhythm is so "off" right now. Sidenote:  it sucks to get that surgery done when you are as elderly as I am. I arranged help for myself for exactly 48 hours and then I thought I'd be good to go. And yeah, NO. It hurt for weeks afterward.

Anyway, back to my point. I prefer to get up early...painfully early...to run and do my devotions and drink coffee and blog and generally get woken up and all my kinks shaken out before the kiddos emerge and I need to be a present and intentional mama.

I want to be a bee. Bees work hard, and they have really clean little hexagonal houses. Also their houses are always stocked with homemade sweets. What's not to like? So I make little mental schedules for my days, and I mostly don't really follow them, which leads to a lot of completely unnecessary and totally self-made guilt.
 
I just cannot seem to be a bee lately. I belong to an Internet group where we (theoretically) check in with each other in the wee hours to share thoughts about our devotion and to be kind of gently accountable for getting up early. They probably think I'm dead. It's been THAT long since I checked in.

And I don't even know what week we're on in the devotion because I fell off that train around about week 3.

 Of course, I think my standards might also be a little too high. I got up Friday feeling like "oh man, I'm so late. Again" and was then mildly surprised to see that it was 6:27 and in whose world is that LATE? I have been living with a surgeon for too long, apparently. Except you can never really have too long with your husband, but you know what I'm saying.

This morning I did make it up at 5 AM, and I got my run in, WITH my dogs, and I staggered back inside on jelly legs and with a sense of "all is right in the world" until I nearly sat down on Addie, who had apparently ditched her bed in favor of the couch in the playroom/office. Her mind is a mystery sometimes, though I'm very much looking forward to her explanation when she wakes up.

 So back to the topsy-turvy thing, it is slowly dawning on me that life with small children is probably always going to be slightly chaotic and that maybe that doesn't mean that I'm doing it all wrong. Maybe that's just the nature of the beast(s). Perhaps even when I  am on my schedule, weird things will just happen, and my task is not to figure out how to better regulate everything, but how and when to let life happen outside the schedule and the plan.

I guess it's like exercise, where you have to find the right balance between listening to your body's pleas for rest and pushing yourself to make it a little farther.  If you always choose one option over the other, you aren't going to be very healthy.

I feel like I blog about this all the time, though I'm not sure that is true. It might be that I just think about it a lot. My mental blogroll is about 4 times the size of my actual post count, after all.  So, here's to figuring out how the nature of the beast, over and over again, until it's eventually deeply engrained in my own nature. Part bat and part bee, which I think would equal a "beet".