There is no such thing as sanity.

The kids are screaming and running around, alternating between fighting and playing with toy guns and wands.

The dog keeps barking at thin air. Sure one of those times it was the mailman, but all the rest are for absolutely nothing.

The laundry is sitting exactly where I left it, with one load in the washer, one in the dryer. The rest sitting in baskets in front of said machines waiting their turn.

The dishes are piling up in the sink, all dinner ingredients are still sitting in the proper storage spaces they were put after the shopping trip from the other day.

And I am gloriously sitting on the couch, coffee cup in one hand, and a paperback book in another.

This is my idea of bliss during any school vacation.

Who needs sanity anyway?

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I am not the only one right?

Every year I say that I am going to buy less for Christmas for everyone around me.

And just like every other person in the world, I find myself dreading the amount of hours that I will need to work to pay off the credit card debt I accrued instead.

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Just to get this off my chest

Ok guys I have a dirty little secret to share with everyone.

Sometimes I sit and watch travel destination videos on Youtube instead of being productive. I know that everyone does things like this, whether it is to read books or binge watch television shows.

The difference to me is that I spend a good amount of time chasing my kids away from Youtube because they see no problem with sitting for hours upon hours, and days upon days just watching video’s.

So I can’t let my secret get out to them of course. This makes you guys my captive audience!

Now you know.

Let them be little

We often forget that the simplest things are the most crucial for a child’s development, happiness and mental health.

Give them space to breathe, freedom to move, loving kindness, opportunities to get messy and make mistakes.

Give them unbridled, joyful time to bond with Mother Nature.

Give them a chance to experience the real contextual and connected moments we all long for.

 

— Nicolette Sowder–

Oh how fast it goes…

Why is it that it is so easy to lose yourself if the parenting experiment portion of our lives?

When you are growing up you work so hard at making a personality that you like and can be seen in public without fear of constant embarrassment or trouble from the powers that be.

And then you meet “The One” and you feel butterflies and happy feelings all over the place. The well thought thru and meticulously planned wedding happens, and you search and search to find the perfect house for your  make believe future family. You attempt to make it look like you are adult enough to decorate your own house, all while secretly scouring the internet and magazine for ideas to steal and make your own.

Then you find yourself peeing on a stick and holding your breathe.

You dream of what type of parent you will be and what type of birth plan should be planned. You have nine months of these thoughts, hopes and intentions.

Within months you realize that those plans mostly hit the fan, starting from the birth plan and ending….. well never.

Parenting is not a planning kind of event. You have great thoughts, and ideas, and if you implement even half of them then you are doing amazing.

Sometimes I think that single parents have the ability to adapt to children faster because they don’t have to fight with another under slept grown adult about whether it is actually that important to stick to the plan.

Then suddenly you blink and they are overtaking everything. The bigger they get, the bigger the obstacles.

I am not saying not to do it, nor am I saying I regret it. I am just saying to stand back and slow down. Keep yourself sane. Some how, some way, find a place that you can just decompress.

Otherwise you lose yourself in this process and find yourself looking back and wishing that you had taken the time to appreciate it a little more. Maybe you could have taken the time to cherish it a little more.  Don’t get me wrong, you will do this anyway of course. However maybe you will have a little less regret if you can figure out how to slow it down, just a little bit.

 

When the words take away your air

So there is a tv show that I keep seeing on television that has caught my attention. I first saw the preview as I was sitting with my husband watching a tv show. It hit me like a ton of bricks, where he was able to sit and not even notice that my world had tilted on its axis.

The first few lines in this preview was a man saying something like “You’re not going to believe this, but John (or Jeff or whatever his name is) committed suicide”. I have seen this preview multiple times but I am not able to remember any of the rest of the preview. Each time I see it I get stuck on this sentence that starts the commercial off. I imagine that this man is talking to a buddy, and this is the normal way that they talk to each other so the offhand delivery itself doesn’t catch my attention.

What catches my attention is the idea that I have to spend the rest of my life being affected by lines like these. Its been over a decade since I had to hear those words said in a much softer way to me. A decade since the whispers would stop as I walked into the room, or down the hall, just to have them start again after I passed by. A decade since I had to try to find new pieces to start rebuilding myself since he didn’t think about how it would be affecting anyone else.

Who am I kidding it has almost been TWO decades.

So that’s where this kicker just seems to keep kicking.

18 years later, a whole different life later, and yet it still has the ability to kind the wind out of my lungs better than almost else.

❤

Decisions were made

The other day I was set to figure out what kind of mom decision that I wanted to make. I found myself quickly leaning to the decision to finish my “to do” list around my house. A few hours later I realized that I was actually quite agitated because no matter how detailed my lists became of the things that I was going to do to start knocking things off of the original list, I wasn’t feeling satisfied.  (Yes, I have a list problem. I make lists ABOUT my lists. Then I lose them. Imagine that.)

My body and mind was making the decision for me instead. Almost as if I have subconsciously made the decision to stop screwing myself over.

I spent the next 8 hours typing away trying to finish my novel I am writing. I am so close, I can taste it. Now I am in a position to start looking into how to get my work looked at, edited and all the other fun stuff.

Good thing that Google and YouTube exist to help me figure out my next few steps!

Mom like decisions

When I woke up today I felt something that I wasn’t very used to recently. Today I woke up with motivation.

Motivation to make a difference in my life. It doesn’t have to be gigantic, it just has to be something that helps me feel like this train I am on can start moving forward again and get out of the mud it is stuck in.

So here I am at work, listening to motivating video’s on Youtube and I am trying to decided where I want this train to move to in the first place. I feel scattered as I realize that I cant even focus and decide if I would like to use this motivation for the long list of to do’s I have for my house, or for bigger life decisions.

Recently I made a goal board, also known as a vision board. I found myself drawn to motivational sayings the whole time. I couldn’t even focus my goals for this next year because I feel out of control. The kids control me. I live as a side note in the life of my family.

I was quick to push them for specific goals for the next year, while I gave myself leniency. Why?

It all comes back to the idea that I fell into the easy trap of mom life, as I have realized in other blogs I have posted, and I have forgotten that there are things that I could want just for myself. My wonderful husband has asked me over the years what I want to do to make me happy and I have continuously answered by saying “I am fine how things are” and “I have no idea what I want to do for the rest of my life”.

So here I am trying to decide if this motivation will be directed towards the normal mom life decision, meaning the to do list of things to do around the house or if it will be directed to what makes me as a person grow.

Decisions, decisions.