There’s a saying that "the days are long, but the years are short", and if I had a dollar for every time someone said it to me as a sleep-deprived mother of a newborn, I’d be a millionaire.
With a nanny... and a lot more sleep.
The quote has pretty much disappeared from my conversations now that my kids are older, and I’m spending more time obsessing over school than sleep schedules. Which is odd, because as a working parent, it couldn’t be more relevant right now.
I love my life, but I feel like we’re constantly racing against the clock. Days blur into weeks and before I know it, another year has passed.
With three daughters all under the age of seven, I’m well-acquainted with the feeling of trying to squeeze a week's worth of activities into what feels like a single day.
There’s school drop-off and pick-up, lunchboxes, homework, housework, actual work, birthday parties and the ever-growing mountain of laundry. When it comes to spending our limited family time on extracurricular activities, the choices are endless. But the reality is, we can’t do it all. I regularly try, and it always ends in tears. Normally mine.
That’s why I’ve had to get strategic about how we spend our time. We have a "one scheduled activity per day" rule that keeps life in check. Then it’s about prioritising what’s most valuable. After years of trial and error, these are my top four:
1. Swimming lessons
There’s one activity that stands out above the rest — one that I make sure we always have time for, no matter how busy life gets. That is swimming.