What will you do with all your time?

This is the question I got asked most when people realised Tara was starting school. To be honest, I didn’t exactly know how to answer. We are now at the end of the first half term of all 3 Costellos being in school and I will admit to thinking I would have a bit more time than I have.

The fact that I started writing this post last Thursday at an early morning training session in Leeds should alert you to what I spend most of my time doing. Yes, the picture above shows a very early morning start for a drive to Leeds 60 miles away.

I had all these expectations of being completely organised – The house would be a show home, we would have delicious home cooked meals every night that I had lovingly prepared at leisure during the afternoon, my ‘To be read’ pile would be so much smaller and the 13 year old ironing pile would be non-existent.

In reality? … Erm, not quite so relaxed. In the past 6 weeks there’s 3K more miles on the car, lots more dust in the house, still a huge ironing pile and only 1 book read. What we have managed to do is an average of 10 swimming sessions per week, plenty of homework, toy testing, recipe development, thousands of emails, mountains of paperwork and thousands of emails.

I have managed a couple of coffee dates, catching up with friends, which has been lovely but feel guilty when people ask me what I’ve been up to afterwards. Why are we programmed to have to justify how we fill our time? I know my routines are back to front with most people – most of my evenings are spent poolside and those 4am starts are impossible without a little nap when I get back home at 10am, but I still can’t relax enough to to turn the tv, sit down and do nothing all day.

This post has now taken me 5 days to finish – IN that time, I’ve driven to Glasgow, spent 2 full days poolside at a competition (5 Silver medals in case you were wondering), taken the kids to a blogging event in Liverpool, 5 wash loads, several hundred stories and answered 5 million mummy questions – Wouldn’t change it for the world but now know why I’m exhausted!

So what do you do with all your time? (If you spend your days watching tv, with a hot brew – good on ya!)