How do you Saturday?

Before I had kids I developed the perfect weekend rhythm.

I worked four days a week (M-TH). With Friday off, I used that day for housecleaning and working on extra writing projects (or other admin tasks I had on my plate).

That left Saturday and Sunday as decidedly different from the rest of the week. They will filled with church, visiting with friends, dog walking, grocery shopping, and enjoying down time with my husband.

In my current season of life with a toddler and baby, and a bustling home (with a new international homestay student) I’m struggling to chase that elusive “restful” weekend rhythm. A weekend that looks decidedly different from the rest of the week.

I guess the reality is that my Saturday often looks like my Tuesday. Or Friday. Or Monday. I have children that need to nap throughout the day. Breakfasts to serve. A home to care for. A dog to walk. Small margins of time to squeeze in little projects or housework. We have dinners to prepare, kids to put to bed, and by the time evening comes we are wiped from the week and the full day that was supposed to be relaxing but felt anything but.

Add on this winter the ongoing strain and drain of a sick baby that needs breathing monitoring and multiple doctors visits a week. I haven’t been able to attend church in person consistently for several months so even my Sunday rhythms are out of whack.

I’m trying to figure out: How should I Saturday best?

What does rest look like in my current season?

I seriously don’t know.

It’s tempting to leave housework until the weekend when my husband can help me, but then we spend all our weekend margin doing laundry, cleaning bathrooms, and doing house projects which doesn’t feel life giving. So then I thought that since I’m home on maternity leave, I should keep up with the home during the week. Which is a great idea, but then unplanned doctors appointments throws my weekdays for a loop. And some weeks I spend enormous amounts of afternoon time in the kitchen baking bread, or prepping dinner so that after I spend almost an hour in the car for daycare pick up, we can eat as soon as we get home.

When should I get housework done? When should I rest? When should I prepare food? When should I care for myself?

Every week I try different things, tweaking our activities.

Last Saturday after a week of packed evenings with not much quality time with my husband, I decided to forgo my usual Saturday morning gym class to prioritize the morning at home all together. It was going to be wonderful. I even prepared a sourdough pancake recipe the night before, finally usually some of my discard which has been building up in the fridge.

But when the morning came, nothing went as I hoped. The baby was up in the night so we didn’t sleep well. By the time I got the pancakes going I realized the recipe was a total flop. The pancakes weren’t flipping nicely and really tasted awful. Absolutely no one ate these horrible pancakes at the table at the same time. Then by the time we were finished we were over an hour behind my “schedule” so we hurriedly got into the car to head off to Costco (my husband’s happy place!) for a family-filled shopping day. It coincided with the baby’s nap time, and as we we navigated the store and saw the crowds fighting over free butter chicken samples I was reminded: Costco on a Saturday is a nightmare.

We rushed around the store grabbing our items and left without a hot dog because there was absolutely no space to sit and our tummies were still full from bad pancakes. The whole day felt hurried, unrestful, disjointed from my hopes, and I thought: I’m doing something wrong.

But WHAT am I supposed to be doing? Or HOW am I supposed to be doing it?

I know I need to accept and embrace that I’m in the season of little kids, and “rest” during this period of my life will look totally different from my life pre-kids. But I still need something. I need some rest (maybe on a Saturday or maybe not?).

I suspect that I’m trying to fit my current life season’s realities into the expectations of a past life season. That’s going to end up in failure every single time.

Maybe in a season of toddlers and sick babies, and multiple loads of laundry a week, Saturday isn’t going to be filled with sleeping in, no demands of my existence, and uninterrupted quiet. Maybe that reality is okay, but I need to find other times and other ways in the week to relax and recover and rest.