By the Numbers, Part II

At the end of last school year, I kept track of one whole week of my time out of curiosity (and yes, a little obsessiveness). I repeated the experiment during summer vacation, when my kids were around more, to see what the differences were and to get a better sense of what might be an 'average' amount of time for some of my more consistent activities.

I've just now gotten around to breaking down the categories from that summer week, for those few people who are curious about what a stay-at-home mom of four (without a pool membership) does:

sleeping    61 hours
cleaning/chores/child care   28 hours
cooking/dishes    16 hours
screen time    9 hours
church/spiritual    6 hours
driving    6 hours
eating/grooming    6 hours
reading/writing    6 hours
misc.    30 hours (things such as exercising, playing the piano, and socializing)

Notably, my mommy chores did indeed leap up rather steeply with all the kids home, despite the fact that they're old enough to be quite helpful most days, and I required more of them this summer than ever before. In fact, that number more than doubled; I'm hoping that it really reflects more quality time spent with them, and not just more work on my part. Thankfully, to counterbalance that increase, I seem to have been in the car less, though my other activities stayed fairly constant.

Unfortunately, also included in the 'miscellaneous' category are 6 hours of time that I simply flaked on recording, blank spots on my spreadsheet where I for the life of me couldn't think of what I had been doing. Obviously I wasn't quite as obsessive a record-keeper this time, and it could explain the 8-hour jump of misc. time from the previous record. Either that, or I had a secret crime ring, or a really hot love life all of a sudden. I'm not admitting or denying anything...