wasting time

When I have very young children, I have this problem of not taking advantage of every single opportunity to be productive. Sometimes it's just because I'm so exhausted that all I want to do is rest, which I guess is ok, but more often, exhaustion is not the reason.

I find myself just standing or sitting and doing absolutely nothing in a moment while the kids are doing a good job of entertaining themselves. I could be getting some laundry folded or dishes put away, but I don't.

I call this couch prison. 

I almost feel trapped or frozen. Like I really want to get up and get busy but something is holding me back. Not energy, but something else. 

I'm not sure if it's that if I get up and start doing something, they will hear me and suddenly I will have distracted them from their lovely self play and then they will stop playing and proceed to whine at my ankles. 

Or maybe it's that I hate starting a project and not being able to finish it. It drives me crazy if I start cleaning the kitchen and have all the momentum going and suddenly I have to stop to console/feed/ clean or rescue someone and don't get to finish what I was doing. Because with my kids, once you've picked them up, it's hard to put them back down and it's almost not worth the fight. 

And then I'm left looking at a kitchen that still appears fairly dirty even after I put in all that work. It's extremely frustrating and defeating.

Or maybe it's that I've grown to feel like it's pointless to pick up the house. I clean up the kids rooms and playroom and put everything in these nicely organized bins and beautifully lined up rows only for them to dump all the bins out into a giant pile on the floor again. 

Some moms are able to get their kids to only play with one toy at a time and know to pick up one toy before getting out the next but I'm not sure how they do this. Do they monitor their playing continuously? These seem to be the same moms whose house is always perfectly clean. But when do they have time to clean it if they are always hovering over their kids? 

I don't know about them but as soon as my kids find an activity that entertains them, I feel like that is my chance to finally walk away and either get something done or just have a moment to myself. And this is when they proceed to completely trash a room that I have recently cleaned. Sometimes I think it's better to just leave the room trashed all the time and not waste my efforts. 

Or maybe the couch prison moment is when the kids are napping. I have a pretty small one story house and most cleaning has the potential to wake them up. 

Whatever the reason, I just know I'm always feeling behind and out of time yet I also feel like I have moments where I'm doing nothing. My house is forever a mess and I think I will forever feel like I'm failing at this perfect mom thing.