I did it !!!

I'd been avoiding it all day, getting other things done, yet constantly my eyes would drift over to the wall above my computer in the living room. Where I have taped my 30 day challenge on the wall so that I can't miss it and so it is accessible.

I was finally sitting on the couch, eating some salt and vinegar chips, reading Mockingjay while my girls napped, throwing dirty looks at the workout plan I had promised to do, yet really couldn't bring myself to "feel" like working out... So I bucked up and got my ass off the couch. Funny the whole thing took less than 10 minutes and I got to put a shiny star sticker on today's workout. 

The result? Breathless and feeling like jello. I have realized that I am hopelessly out of shape. I think I am going to do each day twice, so basically my 30 day challenge to myself is in reality only half of each "challenge", but looking ahead to day 15, doing 45 situps kind of scares the crap out of me right now... So lets make this practical... I'll put stickers on each day twice :-) and the deal is if I miss a day that isn't a "rest" day then I repeat the previous day before proceeding. I don't want to go to far too fast and get overwhelmed and very very sore and give up entirely, so we will keep it practical.

So thats my post today, just letting anyone who reads this know that I did in fact succeed at starting my workout plan. Which is a bit of a big thing for me these days :-P

Now to get on with making 4 shepherds pies for the freezer :-P

Wow, 3 posts today :-P

Because I have nothing better to do today, I'm blogging again... However I am hoping that by doing a post about my 30 day fitness challenge will actually inspire me to do it. I had attempted to start a 20 day challenge, however in involved quite a bit of jumping jacks, and as any breastfeeding mother will tell you, that's not exactly a good idea... 

So, here it is !!!

 

So I found these 3 routines on Pinterest, and they seem simple enough, and require no equipment other than myself and my living room floor. I've printed them off and put them on my wall, right where I can see them every day. I even have shiny star stickers to put on each day as I complete it :-) Alright... I've said I'm going to do it, now the task is to wake up tomorrow and actually do it !!!

 

Get your shit together girl !

Well, the last 2 days have slowly been getting better. I have literally done NOTHING at all for a few days, mainly keeping my kids fed and happy. Sharae and I decided we both needed purple toes with sparkles. (of course sparkles, you just can't NOT have sparkles, there's some unspoken rule or something). 

So today is recovery mode, because as any mother can tell you, if Mommy technically goes MIA off the job for a few days, its like a hurricane happened, as a friend of mine said "Hurricane Sharae". Which pretty much sums it up. I am once again dancing around my living room, doing pirouettes attempting not to step on every Melissa & Doug toy my children have. They are WONDERFUL toys... My kids love them, and I love them (they are entertaining and don't make noise, isn't that why every parent loves them?). I'm sure every parent is with me though when I say that the big wooden shaped beads are almost as bad as Lego to step on... almost.

However I can say that my dishes are done and my kitchen is cleaner, which is a good thing because I want to make cookies this afternoon, and make it messy again. The big question on my mind right now is Cookies or cleaning.... bwahahaha who am I kidding, that's not really a question.

I did make chocolate bars, and as promised I took pictures... but I'm not writing that post today, I'll save it for a day where I need some happy inserted somewhere. For now I am for the most part back to my happy self, which even if that is "just for the time being" I am happy with that and I will make the best of it while I've got it. I have to say so far, with my pact of blogging, I've done pretty good, 4 posts in 10 days. I can live with that.

Now on with my busy day ! Hope yours is as great as I plan to make mine :-) 

just a quick thought....

Today, as I put my kids laundry away, I was struck with the thought of "Wasn't there more in the basket when I folded it?". See, its a funny thing, because laundry gets done, folded, and the kids get dressed, yet by the time I get around to putting laundry away, I have less to put away because of course, my laundry basket full of clean folded clothes is in my living room.... this makes it easier to access than their dresser, bringing up the question, what if I just eliminated the dresser and just kept their clothes folded in the laundry bin...

A brand new day

Well, my bad day that I blogged about last, became a bad week. To be completely honest its been a terrible week, but those who know what its like to struggle with anxiety and panic attacks know how often it is that it is a silent kind of terrible. The kind that simply exists in your mind.

I find I know when a panic attack is imminent, and its amazing how adept I have become at pushing it back, and ignoring its protests at being silenced. Its like there is a great big kettle in my mind, I picture it as a cauldron, and I put things that bother me, and things that stress me out into this cauldron. Well eventually something comes along and basically acts as a "trigger", and it lights a fire under the pot. Well what happens to a pot full of stuff, under heat, it eventually boils over. There is no stopping this from happening, I'm pretty sure there is a scientific explanation for what I am explaining, except that its going on in my head. 

So anyway, this last week has been hard. Made doubly hard by the fact that I feel like I am waging a constant war against an army that I created myself. My dishes, my laundry, my messy house, my dogs, my KIDS ! The fact that I have to cook dinner every night... I mean seriously, do they need to eat every night? Now I am making myself laugh, but its true, you can get so caught up in the day to day bullshit, and before you know it your in a hole that you dug yourself.

Why am I being so brutally honest here? I mean its the internet... first off, I don't share this on my personal Facebook page anymore, if your reading this you probably don't know me, but perhaps your going through some of the same things as I am. Perhaps knowing that someone else is on the same journey as yourself can give you a little brightness in your day. And I promise this blog is not going to be all negative with no positives, but this blog is mine, and it belongs to me, it is my emotions, my experiences and my opinions. And lately I have had a hard enough time just getting to the end of my day. But I feel a change in the wind, and better days are coming, I just need to take it one day at a time and get back to where I'm more in touch with my inner happy. 

I'm going to make chocolate bar's tonight, perhaps I will take pictures and write up a nice blog post about that tomorrow :-) Cheers !

And here we go... again...

So its been a while since I "blogged", so long that I deleted all of my previous sporadic posts and I am starting afresh. 

I need a place to vent some of my frustrations, celebrate some of my achievements and basically just let it all out. I'm not sure why but I've had a few bad day's recently. Totally acceptable, I mean all of us are entitled to our bad days, its just that I seem to have so very few of them, that when I have a bad day, I have a REALLY bad day. The feeling is so foreign to me that its honestly a semi-traumatic experience.

I used to wage a silent struggle with anxiety and frequent panic attacks, and while I have made huge leaps forward in dealing with and finding coping mechanisms, I still have bad days. This is what I mean by semi-traumatic, because a bad day for me means trying with all my might and emotional strength to fight off what I know is an oncoming full blown panic attack, simply to just totally blow up and lose it. And when I lose it I lose it bad. You would think I would just learn, that when I feel it coming to just let it come and get it over with, but the human mind does not work like that, at least mine doesn't. 

I'll admit, I spend a lot of energy simply holding it together for the sake of my 2 kids, who do not need to see me in, to quote Anne Shirley "The depths of despair". And for the most part I am successful, but I'll admit, I'm human.  We had a moment yesterday, where not only were both my girls bawling their eyes out, but I was too. Sitting on the couch with my girls, just bawling. Once they realized that I was crying just as hard as they were, its amazing how quiet both of them went, and how calming that quiet was to me. Sharae started stroking my head and Teyla was just looking at me, and I realised that I had just shown my girls a part of me. The part of me that isn't just "Mommy". 

We become so absorbed with being "Mom", or being "Wife", it dawned on me that I really, really despite trying, have NOT been spending time on being "Emma". I needed that wake up call, that realization that I need to spend time just being me for a bit each day, because when Mom has a bad day, everyone has a bad day. Imagining doing more for myself is not the same as doing it, and I need to get my ass in gear.