Building rest into your life

I like to say yes when people ask me if I can do something, my default answer is, “Yes, I can help with that.” “Yes, I’d love to come to that.”

Then I look at my calendar and it’s full to the brim and I’m left wondering where the month has gone. I’m learning that does not work long term.

Eventually you get tired, you get cranky, and worst of all you start to snap at poor innocent kids who just left out the milk for the thousandth time. Or maybe that’s just me. So, I’m working to say no. And, it’s hard, so very very hard.

But saying no allowed me to be available this past week when Tara’s Mom was hospitalized and have a fairly free schedule when Tara had to fly down at the last minute because it became more serious.

 

I’ve learned you have to build in rest. One of my goals is to keep Thursday afternoons free so the kids can just lay down and rest. Then I can do that.

I need to build in the time to clean. Another item I don’t like to do. Left to myself I let my house deteriorate until it’s terrible and then go on a mad “must clean the house spree,” and make everyone miserable.

That’s my goal for this month to build in times where I don’t worry about optimizing my time, and I don’t worry about getting the last bit of joy out of every moment. My goals to work towards:

1. One weekend each month does not have something booked. I’m not going to make that in October, but at least October is only one item each weekend, not several.
2. Keep Thursday afternoons free so the kids can lay down and read, by that point in the week they need a break.
3. Invite a family over for dinner every couple of weeks so we can practice hospitality.  We’ve become rather insular this past year.
4. Plan play dates for kids on Sunday afternoons.

You may be wondering what those last two have to do with rest.  I want to build serving others and our kids into how our family recharges and make that important.

 

As to the rest of our life…

I took each of my kids out for their first milkshakes these past two weeks.  Apparently I’d never done that before, so they thought it was the coolest thing ever.

 

We helped clean the church where Princess’ AHG troop meets, which meant there was some 40 girls running around competing for cleaning jobs.

We finished reading Ella Enchanted and had our movie night.  We did a “grafitti wall,” where they wrote questions about Ella Enchanted as they were reading it.  I’m thinking we might do that on a more regular basis.  Though a smaller one.  I made this one too big.

 

Our big project these past few weeks has been cleaning out our garage.  It’s been a big huge mess, and we cleaned it all out and then took 3 loads of stuff to Salvation Army.

We’ve continued our kiddo gaming group.  It’s our boys, and a friend and his son all playing together.  This particular week we had another couple of kids at our house as the kids tried to plan out how to regain the kidnapped kids from the goblins.

I’ve started planning my knight hoodie.  I’ve got all these great details sketched out and ideas for what I want to do, and then I lost my sketch book, which makes me very sad.  I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, I just need to figure out where.

In actual subject areas, we learned all about Daniel and Neubchadnezzar’s dream, caves, Jerome and the Latin Vulgate, classical India, Mercury, started learning about Venus, and Batman has been busy with his Chinese class (which you’ll hear a bunch more about tomorrow).

Sorry for the all over aspect of this post, but I wanted to get all of my memories together for these past couple of weeks, only to discover my brain is rather disjointed right now with everything I’m trying to keep in my head.  I’ve got plans for a Rome week, field trips to a pumpkin patch, the local kid museum, NASA, the battleship Texas, and the Rennaissance Festival.  Oh, and I’m organizing meals for Tara’s family right now and getting everyone news of what is going on, which is a lot of information to keep straight as Superman tells me sometimes, “IT just feels like my head is too full of knowledge and something is going to fall out.”

Don’t forget the super cool sale for the Book and a Big Idea is going on right now, if you’re not sure what that is, click on the link and find out how you get over 15 hours of listening materials and over 500 pages of great homeschooling ideas.

Let’s pretend I got this out on Friday, okay?  I’d like to pretend I was organized about something this past week.  I completely forgot about a meeting yesterday.