Life is hard. And for you working moms, I swear life is even harder (at least from my own experience). You’re trying to maintain a career, while juggling time with your hubby and little one(s). Let alone all of the housework and laundry and pet projects and side projects and everything else on your “to do list.” It seriously is a juggling act.

Not only that, but it can appear very mundane and repetitive at times. Every day, you get up, get ready, go to work, make dinner, go to bed.

Every. Single. Day.

If you’re like me, people can set their clocks to you. But it’s what we have to do in order to stay on top of things. Well, sort of. Are we ever truly “caught up” on things?

And heaven forbid you take a day or night off as a break. Forget cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. You just want to relax and watch a show on Netlix. Only to wake up the next morning to find you have twice as much to do in half the time, which takes stress levels into overdrive. It’s like we’re running in a hampster wheel, not really getting anywhere.

What does my typical day look like? Here’s a glimpse into my Monday through Friday:

• 5:10 a.m. | Wake up and either take a walk, pack meals for the day, pay bills (on payday) or simply take advantage of some quiet “me” time.
• 5:40 a.m. | Take shower
• 6:00 a.m. | Wake up husband, put on makeup, get dressed, do my hair
• 6:30 a.m. | Straighten up the living room, make breakfast, unload dishwasher, finish packing meals for day (for both me and hubby), get little one out of bed, feed her breakfast
• 7:00 a.m. | Out the door
• 7:30 a.m. | At work ready to face whatever might happen that day
• 4:00 p.m. | Leave work
• 4:30 p.m. | Get home, hug little one, make dinner
• 5:00 p.m. | Sit down for dinner as a family
• 5:30 p.m. | Clean up kitchen, start dishwasher
• 5:50 p.m. | Time to play with little one (or do a load of laundry or get groceries or whatever other project that may be critical that day… but mostly, I take advantage of the time to spend with little one)
• 6:45 p.m. | Give little one bath and start bedtime routine
• 7:15 p.m. | Little one is in bed. Time to change into my pajamas, pull hair back, take out contacts… then sit down to work on blog, write grocery list, design some random graphics piece, plan a party, or whatever needs done
• 8:30 p.m. | Shut things down to let my mind wind down so I can fall asleep
• 9:15 p.m. | In bed

There it is. My week. Day in and day out. Predictable.

Then on the weekends (outside of spending time with my family), I have to catch up on laundry and house cleaning… not to mention even attempting to find time to work on the house construction project. OY!!

And heck, my kid isn’t even old enough to participate in extracurricular activities, so we aren’t even having to juggle those crazy schedules into our lives.

There is NEVER enough time in the day. Never enough time to keep a perfect home AND to spend enough time with family AND make the perfectly healthy meals AND everything else in between.

So how do we manage it? How do we keep our sanity? Some families are able to hire help, which helps a LOT. For Christmas, my family gifted me a couple months’ worth of house cleaning. Talk about AH-MAZ-ing! I’d love to hire someone to do my laundry, get groceries and make us healthy meals. But the average household can’t afford such luxuries.

So what do we do? We keep pressing on. We keep finding ways to be more efficient. We keep going because… We are women. We are mothers. We are wives. And THIS is what we do. We are strong. We are persistent. We are determined.

And by golly, we love our families and want to take care of them.