The alarm goes off at 5am. Time to get in a morning workout before the kids are up! At 6:15am you’re back home and take the dog out for a quick game of fetch before hitting the shower. Then you run to the kitchen to start the morning routine: make the coffee, pack lunches, cook breakfast, prep for tonight’s dinner, check the calendar to make sure coordination for after-school extracurriculars are handled. 7am, you start dragging the kids out of bed. One of them is always a morning person, greeting you with far more energy than you were prepared for. The other has her shoes on the wrong feet and pants on backwards. 7:45am, you head to the bus stop. Once the kids are off, you begin your 1-hour commute to the office (which is really only 13 miles away, but this is the DC suburbs after all). 9am, you get to your desk and start your busy workday. When it hits 4pm, you check to make sure whatever needed to happen after school happened. 5pm and it feels like you’ve barely gotten anything done. But you head out to traffic, hoping to get to pickup by 6:15. You’re home at 6:30pm and run the dog before starting dinner. The kids do homework at the kitchen table while you cook.

By 7:45pm, you’ve just finished cleaning up from dinner and have to start the bedtime routine. Both kids need showers, but first you check their backpacks.One kid “just remembered” they need something very specific for a school project and it’s due tomorrow. Plus there’s a library overdue notice and you don’t remember ever seeing that book. The other kid has pajama day tomorrow and his favorite set needs to be washed! You multitask starting the laundry while getting the kids cleaned and brushed and read to and tucked in. It’s 9pm. You have to run to the store or your kid will be the only one who didn’t have what she needed for class the next day. 10pm, you’re home and you finish the laundry. All you want to do is spend a little bit of time on your hobby but now every minute you spend on that hobby is another minute less than 7 hours of sleep you will get that night. You opt for sleep, slipping into bed at 10:30pm…

…but you still haven’t figured out where you are going for date night Friday and your babysitter hasn’t confirmed. And the kids are overdue for their annual physicals, but you didn’t get a chance to call the pediatrician today. And you need to find a handyman to fix that bedroom door that is one swing away from falling off the hinges and your bathroom tiles are popping up. Plus your kids’ clothes drawers are overstuffed with things that no longer fit. And you have those two coat closets that have just become a place to shove things before company arrives. And you haven’t even planned meals for the rest of the week, let alone made the grocery list. And one kid seemed a bit sad this evening and you’re worried he doesn’t have many friends at school. The other kid had a whole lot of red ink on her assignments. And goodness, you barely even saw your partner at all today. And OH NO, your sister’s Birthday is next week and you haven’t even thought about what to do for her… You lie there waiting for sleep to come and try to silence your racing mind. You could have been enjoying your hobby. You could have been sleeping. Instead, you look at the clock and it is 1:24am.

Does this sound vaguely familiar? If so, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Running a household is so much more difficult than it should be! Research shows that an average two-parent household works the equivalent of 3.5-4 full time jobs!!! Sure, we may be able to relatively easily hire someone to clean the house, take care of the landscaping, babysit, or even care for our pets. But it is much more difficult to offload the “mental load” of running a household.