Practicing Procrastination. (Warning - boring blog....)

Doctors practice medicine. I practice procrastination. I really don't have to practice any more. I am so good at it. Procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate.

And I don't think it has very much to do with the fact that I have four children and we homeschool. It goes much deeper than that.

I have read a lot about procrastination. It seems that because I am such a perfectionist, I tend to put things off because I don't think I can do them perfectly. All or none, that's me. The more important the task, the more likely I am to put it off and then have to do it at the last minute with absolutely no hope of doing it well. It's such a strange phenomenon.

This morning, I mailed two Mother's Day gifts. Before Mother's Day. Three days before. My mother is likely to faint in the post office when she realizes what is in the box. My mother-in-law will also be quite surprised, I am sure. They'll wonder if it's a fluke. Or if I hired a service. Or if possibly Mother's Day was last month and they missed it. Because I can't remember the last time I mailed a gift on time.

I guess the one bad thing about this is that I don't know if they'll like what I sent...that bothers me, but I forced myself to just decide on a gift and MAIL IT. Victory for the all-or-none girl.

Thing is, I care very much about honoring them on Mother's Day. And birthdays are important to me. I mean, gift-giving is one of my top love languages! But I have this fear of not doing it well enough. Of giving a gift that will seem thoughtless or cheap or not just good enough. So then I procrastinate, miss the event, and after that, well, in my mind the gift has to be even better because it's late!

This translates to so many areas of my life. I really hate it. Here's a list of things I have been procrastinating:
1. Mailing 3 birthday presents, one from September, one from November, one from April (I consider that one right on time - for me.)
2. Thank you notes from when Corey was born in July.
3. Organizing my unscrapped photos.
4. Planning the rest of our school year. (We go all through the summer.)
5. I'm sure there's more.

Some things I do not want to procrastinate but have the potential to procrastinate are:
1. My MIL's birthday gift (in 2 weeks)
2. Planning my classes that I'm teaching at my LSS this month and this summer.
3. My MMM entry.
4. Jolie's birthday in June.
The list apparently goes on and on because I can't type fast enough to get it all down...