New rhythms

This week we've quickly gotten into a new temporary rhythm.

Another photo to help me remember our time away...

• The boys have swapped their household chores. We do things a little differently around here. Boys have jobs they do for years at a time. So a change is significant. Thankfully they all seem to be happy with the change.
• To mark moving into high school our middle son is now in charge of his own washing, he's also taken over the job his big brother had of hanging up all the washing for the family through the week.
• Our youngest has taken on his big brother's job too: breakfast washing during the week.
• Our eldest is moving in to new territory. He will be helping more with meal preparation. He also suggested that I could consider him a "house-elf", which apparently is something from Harry Potter. We'll see how that all works out.
• Speaking of Harry Potter, we've embarked on a seven-day marathon of Harry Potter movie watching. Tonight is number two.
• All three need to work on their fitness, so David proposed that they could all go for a run at 5pm. That worked yesterday, then this afternoon we had a thunderstorm that put them all off kilter and no running happened at all. Hopefully they'll be able to get into a rhythm with this.
• This week David and our eldest are in charge of menu and meals. David's a good cook, so there's no concerns there. Our son is quite adequate at following a recipe, but he's a little inexperienced when it comes to main meals. Last night we ended up eating quite late as a result.

And I'm sitting at my computer working. I'm glad to be back at work, actually, as holidays were getting boring. But I'm feeling a bit frustrated this evening. I'm plodding along at a pace that doesn't seem to be making too many inroads into what needs to be done. Indeed my To Do list is growing faster than I can cross things off on it.

The weather doesn't help me a lot. It's hot and humid. We typically try to live economically, which means without air con as much as possible. At this time of year that translates to turning it on some time during the morning or early afternoon when I'm sick of coping in the heat (David seems to be much more tolerant, maybe because he grew up in a hotter climate than I). I lasted until 2pm today. Nights are challenging too. We have no air con in our bedrooms. For me, going to sleep when my room is 30C+ and no breeze is hard. We have a floor fan and I use an "ice pillow" (like a slow-melting ice pack), but when I woke to use the toilet at 2.30 the ice pillow was already room temperature. To get back to sleep I wet my t-shirt and hair, which worked.

Tomorrow I'm determined to get up earlier (I've been lazy, still on holiday-mode these last couple of days) and get more done!