Adventurous Mom

Posts Tagged ‘overloaded moms’

“How do you do it all Maken­zie?  You must be so busy!!”

I hear this all the time when I encounter peo­ple.  Work­ing on two busi­nesses from home, tak­ing care of my hus­band (whom I might add is recov­er­ing quite nicely and doing a great job at this point of tak­ing care of him­self!), and shut­tling the kids to and from school.  Home­work, base­ball, play dates, lunches, din­ner etc…!

It doesn’t really seem that over­whelm­ing when I am going through my day–well most days.

A LifeHacker’s Views on Time Management

It all starts with my morn­ing, I am not a morn­ing per­son typ­i­cally, so I “roll” out of bed around 0730, pray­ing that my hus­band has been able to make his way to the kitchen before me to put on my morn­ing “heaven” (aka cof­fee.)  Morn­ing really sets the tone for the rest of the day for me.  This is the part of the day that I have to really be present, to focus my ener­gies, to align with the stars, to regain my Chi.…and ALL of it!  Because if I ALLOW my morn­ing to go bad, then quite fre­quently I have a hard time get­ting in front of my day.

The con­cept of Time is a funny one to me, because some days just seem to go by so quickly and some are a mean­ing­less mess and drag out for­ever!  Yet, Time always Feels in my favor, when I have a chance to get my energy AHEAD of TIME.  Makes sense or no?  If I can be present in the NOW, slow down my “reac­tion speeds” and work on my “proac­tion” speed, then it seems like Time is on my side.  ProAc­tiv­ity vs. ReActivity

Of course part of this proac­tion speed is defin­ing my day! I define my day on sev­eral levels.

1. How do I want to FEEL today? What do I want my energy to be like?  Do I want to be a pissed off, angry mom?  Or do I want to be a happy, joy­ful, peace­ful, fun mom?  (I choose the lat­ter because it is more fun!)
2. What do I want to DO today? And for some this seems like a ridicu­lous ques­tion because you HAVE to do so many things.  So let me point you back to the idea of Proac­tion…  When you choose to do some­thing, you allow your­self to feel proac­tive, it’s your choice, it’s your deci­sion! Yay!  When you feel that you HAVE to do some­thing, you’re react­ing to out­side influence…and well 99.999% of the time you’re the only one that can make the choice for YOU!!  So are you being respon­si­ble for your choice, or are you giv­ing up your power of choice?  Think on this for a lit­tle while.…
3. What do I want to BE? This can be such a broad state­ment, but often I chose to be inspired, to be fun, to be happy!!  I also chose to BE a MOM, to be an Entre­pre­neur, to be a Run­ner.…  I get to choose these things every­day!  What do you choose?

A few sim­ple steps to align your Mind with Clar­ity and good energy will allow you to get ahead of TIME!

(PS — I also do this trick, that was rec­om­mended by Zig Ziglar that on days when I roll out of bed and feel just cruddy, I jump up and down 10 times, laugh and say “This is the best day of my life!” “This is the best day of my life!”.…then I look in the mir­ror and say “I’m talk­ing to you–turn that frown upside down!”  It is so ridicu­lous, but it’s a fan­tas­tic pat­tern inter­rupt!  Works!!)

I don’t know if you rec­og­nize that a lot of my posts are about get­ting your MIND and your ENERGY in the right spot.  Lit­tle of it has to do with how much time or effort I put into cer­tain tasks.  I used to be that very task focused-driven person.…but it didn’t work for me, I was a mis­er­able mess!  So I had to try some­thing dif­fer­ent.  Focus­ing on my thoughts before focus­ing on my actions was the BIGGEST dif­fer­ence.  IT works…no bull­shit here!

Two more “No Bull­shit” Life­Hacker Tips:

The best Wheat Bread on this Side of the Mississippi:

This is the EASIEST bread recipe I have found.  You have to do it 2 or 3 times until you find the rou­tine, and you will be ask­ing why you spend so much on bread at the store!!

1. 1 cup warm water
2. 1 Table­spoon Milk
3. 2 Table­spoons oil
4. 3 Table­spoons Honey (I usu­ally add more!)
5. 2 Table­spoons Brown Sugar ( I some­times sub­sti­tute Molasses)
6. 1 tea­spoon Salt
7. 1–1/2 cups all-purpose flour
8. 1–1/2 cups whole wheat flour
9. 2 tea­spoons instant active dry yeast.

1. Com­bine Ingre­di­ents #1-#6 in a large mix­ing bowl, stir.

2. Add flours and yeast, and knead (turn on the kitchenaid mixer) for 10–15 min­utes.  Dough should be smooth and elas­tic.  Place dough in a greased bowl, turn­ing once to grease top.  Cover with plas­tic wrap, let rise in warm area (usu­ally above the refridger­a­tor or oven works well.)

3. Punch down dough; knead for a few min­utes until smooth then form into a loaf.  Place in a greased loaf pan and cover.  Let rise again until dou­bled, about 30 min.

4. Bake at 350 for 30–25 min­utes.  Remove when done and allow to rest in pan just for a few min­utes (any longer and it starts to sweat!)  Easy peasy!  Enjoy!

HOMEWORK!!

I don’t know about you, but my biggest bat­tle with home­work is try­ing to just get it done!!  How many times have I asked him?  Is it done yet?  Finally I was exas­per­ated by my attempts to fin­ish it the night before it was due (for us, it’s a Wednes­day!) and I thought, well, I will do what many com­pa­nies do when they want the job done ahead of schedule…factor in BONUSES!!

So his home­work sched­ule looks like this:

Home­work comes home on Fri­day due on Thursday.

If it’s com­plete by Mon­day — $3 bonus.…

If it’s com­plete by Tues­day — $2 bonus.…

If it’s com­plete by Wednes­day $0!!!

Why $0 on Wednes­day? The goal was to get him to com­plete his home­work before crunch time, so now he’s self-motivated to com­plete his home­work on Mon­day or Tues­day.  He doesn’t have to do it over the week­end, and he gets to choose when he wants to do it.  Either choice has an impact, but it’s ulti­mately his choice!!

Thanks to all of my read­ers who so gra­ciously fol­low along with my posts!  You inspire me every­day to make great posts!  Feel free to drop me a line and make com­ments!!  Many Adven­tures to You! ~Makenzie

Yes, I dropped the ball this week. At least that’s what it felt like. I have to admit that as hard as I try to bal­ance and spin all of my plates, or to jug­gle all of my balls, I, like all, am human. Like a lot of full time work­ing moms, I have a lot of things going on at once. I have my first shift which is my work shift which is career work, my sec­ond shift or wife and mom shift, and then some­where in between I make room for self-renewal, self– care, and per­sonal devel­op­ment. All three are a pri­or­ity to me, but by-far the most del­i­cate of all my respon­si­bil­i­ties is that of being a mother. At this point I am not only respon­si­ble for myself but I have two very spe­cial lit­tle men for which I take respon­si­bil­ity. Luck­ily my lit­tle men are very resilient and for­giv­ing. This week I received word from my son’s teacher that unless his writ­ing skills improved there may be a pos­si­bil­ity he wouldn’t move onto sec­ond grade. “Ouch!” That news stung worse than a dozen wasp stings.

How could I be such a bad mother? How could I drop this frag­ile ball? How did I not see this com­ing? What other balls might I be drop­ping next? I was com­ing off of my “I’m so lucky to be alive” High.…how can this hap­pen now?

I was dis­traught to say the least. It took me sev­eral days, meet­ings with the prin­ci­pal and sched­uled meet­ings with the teacher, phone calls to my mom, dis­cus­sions with my sis­ters and hus­band, my coach, and prob­a­bly half a dozen oth­ers to real­ize that yes Virginia.…I am human. Per­haps my reac­tion was an over-reaction because of the emo­tional nature of this sit­u­a­tion. But another hard les­son learned.…I must real­ize and be okay with the pain that may come by my human fail­ures. Fail­ing is merely a judg­ment, so did I really fail? Who is my biggest judge of this, ME?

Tak­ing a step back, my hus­band and I real­ize that our First Grader WILL be mov­ing onto Sec­ond Grade next year. He is read­ing at Third Grade level and zooms through math like a lit­tle savant. He is a Cy Young award win­ning pitcher that stinks at bat­ting. He needs some bat­ting prac­tice, and he’ll even­tu­ally be mak­ing base hits and RBIs.

So, solu­tion num­ber one is get­ting my son the help he needs with writing.…EASY! Solu­tion num­ber two is learn­ing how to curb my emo­tional response when I have these big upsets. Not so easy, but do-able. In pre­vi­ous blogs, I describe the pain/pleasure con­tin­uum and how life’s dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions are used to teach us lessons. This was a big les­son for me, for two rea­sons: 1. I feel I should com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively with my children’s teach­ers so I don’t get blind-sighted with this kind of news. 2. Antic­i­pate (but don’t expect) emo­tional upsets and learn a con­struc­tive emo­tional response to these set-backs. I don’t think that I refuse to get “mad, sad, angry, or frus­trated”, but allow myself to feel these emo­tions with­out being per­son­ally destruc­tive with these emo­tions. They’re healthy emo­tions to set us back on the right course, help us regain our bal­ance and then to become bet­ter bal­anced so we don’t get thrown off-kilter so eas­ily again.

So, yes, I am human. I do have “bad days”, I am learn­ing to keep my bad days fewer and far between. I strive to live each day enjoy­ably, with pas­sion and doing what I love. My chil­dren deserve a mom that is passionate.…teaching them this life les­son is invaluable!