Business and Boredom

I have never been so busy and so bored at the same time. This is the crazy thing about being a stay at home mom to a toddler: there is so much to do and it is all so mindless! I feel like I have two options. I can do all of the things that need doing around the house and allow my brain to die a slow death via starvation or I can not get everything done around the house and do something that is actually interesting. Of course this means ignoring my toddler, or wrestling to keep him off the computer desk while I type, or allowing him to chew on power cords while I get one more sentence of my novel read.

For a while, I had it perfectly balanced. I was keeping the house tidy and relatively clean and I was really quite happy about it. I felt like I had succeeded at the mommy thing. Yay Jill! Then I realized that now that I could do it properly I didn't want to any more. It was all so boring and repetative. Why spend all my time vacuuming and mopping when my husband is going to come home in a rush and forget to take his shoes off, and then my toddler is going to throw cottage cheese half way across the room? Why pick up the toys only to have them flung on the floor again the next morning? What is the point!

The problem is that now I am just being lazy. I sit around and reading and not getting anything done. It is terrible. My house is not as nice as it was. I don't have that satisfied tidy-house feeling, and I"m not doing anything useful or productive. Its not as if I'm writing or creating something. I have abandoned my lists and schedules. I am getting sluggish. But I am still bored, and annoyed at myself on top of that.

So, oh reader, what is the solution? How do I keep my house, my toddler, and my sanity all intact?