karen in color

I don't want to be exhausted all of the time.
I don't want to clean up my house but I don't want to continue to see actual cobwebs in the corners in every room and globs of dust on every floor and never ending crumbs and food pieces all over the counters and thick dust on every item on every shelf.
I don't want to make meals for my family all day, every day.
I don't want to wash/dry/fold/put away laundry.
I don't want to continue to fail at potty training Violet.
I don't want to discipline Violet at all, but especially when she rebels and we are already late to go somewhere.
I don't want to take care of Violet by myself all day.
I don't want to work at my job while being a parent.
I don't want to plan each day around meals and naps and bedtimes and cranky times.
I don't want to have to close all the bedroom doors in my house to keep my cat out and immediately hide or put away clothes or blankets or things with wires or things that have any fabric on them because otherwise my cat will eat and destroy these things because she has literally been diagnosed with OCD. And she is mean a lot of the time. And I got this cat because I heard that pets help you have less stress in your life when actually this cat has ruined irreplaceable pieces of clothing and things I've made and other things that I really really liked and oh by the way she really really causes me stress.
I don't want to have to carry a lot of stuff with me whenever V & I go anywhere.
I don't want to listen to Violet's favorite song on her Sunday school songs CD one. More. Time.

I want to have free time. A lot of it, not in bits during a nap time or even an overnight break when Violet might stay at my parents house.
I want to do the things I love to do when I want to do them.
I want to wake up when I am rested.
I want to be able to drop in multiple places in one general errands trip without having to take so much time to get Violet in and out of her car seat and gather up all of her stuff that I never have enough hands for.
I want people to acknowledge that Mike and I are doing a wonderfully amazing job at keeping up our friendships with all of our non-parent friends who do not know how time consuming and exhausting this is and how easy (and normal, for most people) it would be to never initiate hanging out with anyone.
I want even JUST ONE of my close friends to become a parent so we can commiserate together about all of this.
I want to be able to work at my job, which I love, and have time to commit myself to it more, so I am able to indulge and contribute my creativity more than I can with a "working parent" amount of hours.

I also want to be with Violet every day and paint pictures with Violet and sing songs with her and teach her things and read to her and hug and kiss her and be around her ~~all~~ most of the time, all of course with Mike by my side.

I love my life... but (at least right now) it is incredibly hard. And I am not blind to the fact that new and much harder parenting challenges will arise with time and that when you add more kids, you add more of everything. These days, I'm trying to figure out how to make my life sustainable, because I feel overwhelmed a lot of the time. It seems like the only time-consuming things I can cut out of my life are things that bring me joy and refreshment, like my job (most of the time) and maintaining this blog and gardening and reading and sleeping.

Let me end with a photo of Violet. Seeing her reminds me of why I do all of this.
But I am trying to figure out how to keep all of this up.