I am a pretty good person, always looking out for others, smiling through life’s problems, that sort of thing.

But I don t half have some bad habits that are hard to break!

Now there’s organised, and then there’s organised!

I believe it’s the Virgo in me that likes to have lists of things to do, that needs me to know what is happening when, that asks a question and needs an answer NOW!

And these are all okay habits, but I can have a tendency to get myself a bit obsessed with them too! And often to my detriment!

Take last night for instance.

There have been lots of changes in our family life since Lil Man started Secondary school. The biggest being that now he is at another school, other than the one I teach at, I have little control or knowledge about things happening there (oh, I find that so hard… but breathe, Ritu… let go…!)

We have to go for his parent meeting soon. Now in primary school, it’s a pretty painless process/ Your child has one teacher, you book a ten minute slot. You arrive, maybe wait if there are any delays, but, unless you have more than one child, thus needing more ten minute slots, you are in and out relatively fast.

Not at secondary school!

Now we have a lotta subjects, so a lotta teachers and a lotta kids whose parents need to be seen!

There is the old fashioned way of booking your slots, which is to fill in a piece of paper, using a pen (remember those?!) requesting the teachers to book you in with a slot. We tried that last time, and I think one teacher managed to actually book a time.

Then I resorted to the new-fangled way, which is an online system! Oh so easy! You see the teachers names that you child has, you book your five minute slots, and leave five minutes in between, to give yourself time to move around!

Great!

If you get in early enough. But if you are one of the last ones to book, you end up with 7 appointments interspersed within a three hour window! But we were relatively quick so only had a couple of waits.

So when I realised his end of year meetings were coming up, I was hot off the mark!

I have been checking the website for the last couple of weeks and knew that the system opened up for booking yesterday.

But what time exactly?

In the morning it informed me that the system would be open 17 from them. I worked it out and made it to be an 11 pm open time.

Being me, Mrs Virgo, I wanted to get appointments booked and out of the way, so I knew what we were doing on that day!

I was tired too.

But I kept myself awake, and had checked throughout the evening to make sure that I know when it was definitely going live! Last time it was live at some silly time like 4 am, so I had to wake up to get the bookings done!

Just before 11 pm I dragged myself to the PC and logged in. The counter that had said one hour to go for the last hour should have said Open at 11 pm, but no.. it told me there were 59 minutes to go!

Dang!

I had to wait until midnight!

Now here was where common sense should have prevailed and told me “Ritu, go to sleep. Get up at your usual time, don’t snooze your alarm, and you can book the appointments them.”

And quite possibly, it did try to tell me that, but stubborn, organised Ritu had her voice on loud speaker! “Ritu, watch another mind numbing programme to keep yourself awake then book, and you can sleep in peace!”

And so I awoke from a snooze just before midnight (luckily with no alarm, otherwise I would have been gutted!) and drowsily headed off to the PC again to book.

Surprise surprise I was probably the first one there, and all appointments needed were duly booked. I could rest easy for the next two weeks!

Except, you know when you wake from a deep sleep, you just can’t go back to bed.

So I was back in bed by 12.07 am and tossed and turned for an hour! And when my alarm did go off, I cursed my inability to listen to common sense!

But I was secretly happy that I got my preferred time slots!

So now I know I shall spend today in a stupor of tiredness – self-inflicted tiredness, at that!!

I should know better!

Any habits that you have that you really should change, but you just can’t quite make yourself to do?