racoma.netI love to write. I write to live. I live to love.

Seven this morning, my kids woke me up, asking for their usual morning breakfast cereal. I groggily obliged, only protesting a bit how early it was. You see, it’s a Saturday morning and one usually wants to sleep in during weekends! Don’t wake me up yet, please. But, alas, with two kids pulling here and pushing there, I had to give in. Wife and baby are still asleep, and I didn’t want them to wake up from the commotion.

On school days, the wife usually wakes me up at 7:00, during which time I would already heat up bath water for the kids, prepare breakfast and coffee (which is my only food-preparing duty through the day, and which i enjoy), and then help the kids get ready for school. Then I drive the two to school, after which I get on with my other morning routines, like check my email, read RSS feeds, write a few blog posts and articles, and the like.

Routines are important, after all, and having kids has let me keep this part of my life in check. I’m normally not much of a routines-oriented person. I tend focus too much on one thing, and I tend to lose track of the time. And once I get distracted, it all becomes a mess of forgotten and unfinished things. So even though I mostly get only about four hours of sleep at night (I usually fall asleep at 3 a.m.), I do enjoy participating in morning routines.

After all, parenting is a shared responsibility. And our family of five (supposedly six, if we count my dearly departed son) is a departure from the usual culture in my country, in which most middle class households have household help to rely on. We don’t have a helper or caregiver, so we try to share the load of chores and responsibilities. So far, we’re doing okay. Sometimes, we get burned out. But we’re proud of the fact that we’re rearing our kids ourselves, and they are not influenced by other people too much, which can be a bad thing if you’re not exactly sure of the personality and backgrounds of other people.

One thing I would like to do better, though, is to apply routines better in my work. Being in front of computer monitors all day, one can get so absorbed with information that I sometimes feel like I’m in a world of my own. Writing generally takes a toll on my energy, that I often get drained after finishing a piece. I’m not entirely sure whether routines and creativity are a good match, because sometimes inspiration hits you at very inopportune moments. But it’s something one has to live with, especially if one wants to make a good living out of being creative.

This post was about one and a half hours in the making. In between, I took the car out the driveway, burped the baby, heated (and ate) leftover pizza, loaded a DVD for the kids to watch, ate half a revel bar and an Oreo cookie, and answered a couple emails. Such is life!

image credit: flickr/hi-phi