Messy Homeschool

Walk away from your blog for a few months and you turn back to find the whole world upside down. Weird.

So, we are sheltering in place, we are social distancing, we are zooming all the things. Yes, the kids are spending too much time on screens. Yes, we are gardening like we’re preppers. We are baking bread, we are washing our hands, we are sewing masks, we are all just trying to hang on.

But how do we educate our children with the world falling apart around us? How do we deal with the seismic shifts in our civilization happening? How do we, especially those of us who haven’t done this before, guide our kids through the next few months without making this more stressful than it needs to be?

There are a lot of resources out there on this, my list is by no means exhaustive but it might help you get started.

1. Schooling at home doesn’t take as long as schooling at school. It takes much less time to get one kid through a lesson than it does 30 so if you’re concerned that your kid is flying through things and doesn’t have enough to do, don’t be. If elementary lessons are taking more than 2 hours, you may need to adjust things. Middle and high school will obviously take longer but it really shouldn’t be 8.
2. If your kids are freaking out over this interruption in their routine/lack of contact with friends/disruption of their lives, it is important to give them all of the grace on this. TAKE THE WEEK OFF!!! A super stressed kid is not a kid who is learning anything. Give them some space to relax into this new reality and adjust their minds around this new life we all find ourselves in.
3. Reading and math are the most important things, anything else is gravy. I don’t mean that history, science, art, etc aren’t important. I mean that those things can be made up later. Reading and math are skills rather than facts. Kids who keep doing those things won’t backslide during this time. You can always remind them about Newton’s third law of motion later. Relearning the times tables is much more difficult.
4. Give yourself some grace here as well. You also have had your world turned upside down. It’s ok to grieve that. If you are not up to teaching full time right now, see #3. Get your kids through those things and then go take a nap or read a book or bake some bread. Do whatever it is that helps you feel a little more normal.
5. Last point, we’ve all seen those color coordinated schedules floating around the internet. No, just No! You do not need to schedule creative time for your kids. I feel like that’s an oxymoron anyway. Throw that schedule out but consider replacing it with a routine that works for you and your kids. This can be pretty loose but it should be consistent. For my kids, they get up when they get up, they eat breakfast (or lunch) when they are hungry but as soon as that first meal of the day is over, we do a quick family meeting where I tell them my expectations of the day. Some families do something similar where they give each kid a list. My expectation have been so few lately that that seems unnecessary. They know they need to have their chores and school work done before they can have screen time. They know that there is no screen time until 3 o’clock. Beyond that, they are in charge of their day and they can decide when things will be accomplished. The routine rather than the schedule gives them agency in their own lives and it means that I spend much less time enforcing or explaining because they knew what needed to happen going in.

The most important thing right now is to give yourself and your kids a lot of grace. Let that eye roll from your teenager pass without comment, give the whiny kindergartner a little more time before you crack down on that nonsense, let yourself sleep an extra half hour if you’re tired. Give your family time to adjust to this new reality and find ways to love each other through this.

I feel like I’ve talked a lot on this blog about mothering yourself, making yourself do the things you don’t want to but know you really should, taking care of yourself the way your mother would if you called her often enough. Well friends, this is why blogs are a stupid idea, because the second we start giving advice, life teaches us something new that we probably should have known by now and we end up looking less than intelligent.

I started doing crossfit in order to take better care of my body. I’d let things slide and it wasn’t good for me so I jumped in at the deep end of the fitness world. I woke up early, I did things I hated and I felt pretty good about myself for doing them, even as my body was in pain that I just took as a matter of course. I even signed up for the CrossFit Open which had me doing crazy things like 200 lunges (Knee all the way down to the floor, thank you very much) with a 35 lb dumbbell on my shoulder. My pain increased and I thought that was just a consequence of being 37, overweight and having done nothing athletic (other than having babies) over the course of my adult life.

That pain was actually tendinitis that was getting more and more extreme because I wasn’t taking care of it. The past many months have been a process of resting it on Doctors orders (a mistake), procedures that sound worse than they are and a lot of physical therapy. The therapy is the most important bit, I’ve seen the biggest change from that. My therapist gives me strengthening exercises and stretches and then does some soft tissue massage that hurts like hell but is effective.

So now, six months later, I am able to clean my house, walk without pain (mostly), I’ve even started running a bit. My kids have rolled with things pretty well but I’m pretty sure they’re excited that I’m up and less grumpy again.

I thought many times in the intervening months, about writing the struggles down and I just some how couldn’t. I couldn’t put into words the failure I felt. I needed it to be behind me before I could tell anyone.

This strikes me as symptomatic of our “fine” culture. Even when we are really struggeling, if some one asks us how we are we all will automatically say “fine.” In some of my deepest, darkest moments, I have appeared happy and fine to others. We want the happy ending to come before we can tell anyone how hard things are.

I started this blog to try to combat that impulse, the same one that has us cleaning up one corner of our house so that our instagram stories will look like they are professionally curated. I vowed to show the messy side of life and rather than do that, I went dark. So that sucks and I’m sorry.

It is in sharing our struggles that we can actually grow and help others to grow. My battle with tendinitis is nothing epic but in my head the discouragement seemed like something I should be past. I’d done something wrong and I couldn’t keep going with the gains that I had made and a bunch of the weight I’d lost came back and all of that sucks and I couldn’t talk about it.

But this is life, taking a stand and getting knocked down and muddling around in the dark and getting back up. I think I’m back up, though I still have a ways to go but I’m at least on my feet again. I’m sure the next knock down will come in its own time and I’ll  try to do better in sharing it when it comes.

This week I’m in Florida with my kids and hubs and mom visiting my aunt and uncle. I thought it might be as good a time as any to emphasize the idea of NOT making every trip into an educational experience.

Homeschool moms have a reputation for turning everything into a teachable moment. We practice addition at the grocery store, we actually pull over when we see signs for historical markers, we read books ahead of field trips to deepen the educational experience there of. I have carted 4 different kinds of field guides on every camping trip we’ve ever taken. I’ve forced my children to talk to strangers on the beach who were collecting shells and had something to teach them. We’ve read a biography of Ethan Allen while at the reconstructed Fort Ticonderoga. All of that is good stuff, don’t get me wrong. I love being that mom.

However, when your whole life is filled with teachable moments, it can get exhausting. After years of teachable moments, one can start to tune them out.

So yesterday, we played at the beach and we didn’t try to identify which animal the shells they collected came from. They played in the waves and no one mentioned the words crest, trough or frequency.  They all got slightly sunburned but no one gave a small lecture on the difference between UVA and UVB rays.

The day before we drove through Lion Country Safari and we listened to the audio tour which told us about the various animals but there was no quiz at the end. Instead we talked about which animal was our favorite and why and for most of the kids it was the the spray ground we visited at the end. Go figure.

But the great thing is that the kids have been learning things anyway. They saw all those crazy animals and had a wonderful time and some of that information sank in. They identified bits of coral on their own. They saw those waves and felt the energy they carried. They are learning even if they don’t realize that they are.

So for the meantime, learning is happening and I’m intentionally not pushing it or trying to enhance it. We are floating and letting things be what they are. There will be lots of time for identifying plants and animals, for mini lectures and teachable moments. Taking time rest can be good for the kids and for you. Take a break when you need to.

***Hold on, I’m not going to try to convert anyone here. This blog is not religious even though I consider myself a religious person. I just think the idea of a Sabbath is a really good one that everyone can benefit from, religious or not.

Ok, that disclaimer out of the way, the idea of a sabbath is that you set one day aside each week to rest and recharge yourself. You work away at your life for 6 days and on the 7th you rest. Anyone who has ever read the “Little House” books knows that this idea has taken some wacky turns in the past. No, no one in my house is forced to sit and read the Bible all day on Sunday, that is missing the point.

Over the last few years I’ve been trying to incorporate the idea of sabbath into our home and I have to say I like it. It started because our church met on Saturday evenings which left our Sundays completely open. At first we used that day to finish up projects around the house or run errands. Then we gradually started to find other times to do those things in order to leave our Sunday’s open.

Now, our Sunday’s involve watching movies and knitting, reading books and playing legos, meeting up with friends and trying new recipes. We keep to things that feel restful to us. I’ve even adjusted my workout schedule so that I do not darken the door of the gym on the weekends. The gym isn’t restful, it’s a weekday thing. Sunday’s are for restful things.

Of course this doesn’t work every week but we do try to keep to it. We are doing school from Monday to Thursday, cleaning the house on Friday. Saturday is all basketball at the moment but when that’s done it will be taken up with gardening and various home improvement projects. Then on Sunday, we binge watch and knit, we hang out with friends we don’t see otherwise, we might even go to a museum if we feel like getting out. We only do things we feel like doing. My hubs needs a little more activity during the day than I do so he will sometimes go to Walmart just for fun (Nope, not kidding).

I don’t know how the rest of the family feels about it, I should probably ask, but I know my own mental health responds well to this rhythm. I think the kids do as well. It gives them time to be board, time to be creative with their time, time to get into fights and work them out.

Try taking a day off yourself, set aside that time and see what happens. I don’t think we were ever meant to go go go all the time. Our bodies and our brains were made for work and for rest and a Sabbath day helps us keep that in balance.

I was recently asked by a few older women what my stance is on tech for my kids. I don’t really have a stance but I tried to explain my lack of stance to these women but I don’t think I did it very well at the time. As usually happens, I thought of 15 other things I should have said on the car ride home. So…lucky you…you get to hear these thoughts that I didn’t articulate at the time.

There are days when my kids watch way too much TV. I fully acknowledge that and understand that it is one of my failings. This does occasionally have bad effects especially on my six year old because she loves watching things about pop stars and cartoon girls who solve mysteries and hurt each others feelings. She watches that crap and then runs around talking in a Valley Girl accent taking selfies of herself on my old phone. It’s not great.

So that’s one side of tech, a six year old making duck lips at an old phone and talking in a valley girl accent whilst rollerblading around my dining room chattering about the crush she has on the neighbor boy.

The better side is my oldest two working together(!) to build a model of Cair Paravel in Minecraft, or my oldest texting her friends to coordinate a movie that they’re making, or my 10 year old looking up new ideas for lego builds on Youtube, or my valley girl 6 year old telling me all about honey badgers because she watched Wild Kratts on Amazon Prime or my four year old telling me about Benjamin Franklin because he watched the Who Was show on Netflix.

We also have been using some documentaries to learn about Black History during the month of February. I am fairly well read but I do not know as much as I should about Black History so Netflix and Amazon have been filling in the gaps for all of us this month. We started with Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History on Netflix which is a nice overview. Then we found a doc on Harriot Tubman on Prime (They called Her Moses) and an episode of the American Experience on the Freedom Riders also on Prime.

I’ve been having a harder time getting up to do the gym early in the morning so I’ve been going to the 9:30am class instead and putting on a documentary for the kids while I’m gone. That way they’re learning something and I still get to take care of myself.

Back to tech in general, we have had to set some limits because kids don’t know how to self regulate a lot of these things yet. We do not allow my youngest kids to have their devices in their bedrooms. All devices get plugged in at 8 o’clock in the dining room. We had a situation where my 10 year old stayed up all night because he didn’t know how to tell himself to get off his tablet and go to bed. We obviously can’t have that so we have an evening ritual of plugging in the devices at bed time and the kids can stay up reading if they want to but there’s no tech after that point.

We also try to keep the conversation open around what they’re doing online. We talk and ask about what they’re doing and they kids respond by going into great detail about what they’ve built in Minecraft or how high they scored in Hill Climb Racing or which robot they beat on Chesskid. They kids want to be able to talk about this stuff and by showing interest in their interest, we keep the lines of communication open.

So many of the nasty stories related to kids and tech that we read are fueled by secrecy. We work very hard to make sure our kids don’t feel that they need secrecy when it comes to what’s on their tech. I don’t have specific rules on what they are or are not allowed to watch because I want them to develop their own judgement about what they should or shouldn’t watch. My oldest accidentally started watching a horror movie around Halloween. Once she realized what it was, she turned it off and told me about it. She is so used to using her own judgement that she trusted her instincts and was able to tell me about it without fear of getting in trouble for watching something against the rules. I’m pretty proud of that, honestly.

Our rules around tech change pretty frequently but my goal is always for my kids to develop and use their own judgement to find what is appropriate for them and to have transparency around their relationship to tech. We say pretty frequently that if you couldn’t tell mom about it, you shouldn’t do it. I’m sure as we enter the teen years this spring I may have to change these policies but for right now, this is what’s working.

I know, I know. I keep harping on about self care. I’m on a kick here and I keep having more thoughts about it so bear with me.

I think real self care can only really be figured out by the person who needs it. That means that no faceless internet guru can tell you what you need to do to properly take care of yourself. Not even me. Shocking…I know.

But, just because it looks different for each person doesn’t mean it’s just going to be what you like doing. It’s not all relaxing with netflix and a bowl of popcorn (this is what I used to think my self care was, not kidding).

Figuring out what you need to do to really and truly become the best version of yourself takes a lot of honesty and deep, probing conversations with yourself and possibly a mental health professional. Frankly, self care kindof sucks sometimes.

My self care looks like getting up at 4:45 in the morning so I can go to a windowless room and let some impossibly muscular whipersnapper (yeah, I said it) tell me to lift things that are heavy until I want to die. Then he tells me to life them again. It sucks!

My self care looks like reading an actual book during our lunch break instead of chilling out with the gang from “Parks and Recreation” on Netflix. My current choice is “Last of the Mohican’s” by James Fennimore Cooper and it is difficult but I can feel my IQ rising as I read it.

Sometimes my self care is making myself go and run a few miles between bouts at the gym. It’s boring and I sometimes hate it but I do my best thinking when I run. For someone who has spent a lot of time numbing out her own thoughts because they didn’t feel good, finding something that helps me process them is HUGE.

My self care also looks like cleaning my own house instead of paying someone to do it for me. The less said about that the better.

My point is that self care is not all pedicures and bubble baths. Those may be a component but as any mother knows, taking care of an organism means giving it what it needs, not always what it wants. This is harder when you are the organism in question but it is worth it. You are worth that kind of care.

When you do the hard work, when you give yourself what you need instead of what you want, it lets you know that you are as important as every other member of your household. You matter. That may not seem like much but for those of us in the low self esteem boat, it’s mind blowing.

So, my only advice is to take a long, honest, zero Instagram filtered look at your life and take notice of what the organism that is you really needs. Do you really need the chocolate, (Some times the correct answer to that one is YES) or do you need a conversation with your husband to deal with that thing that’s bothering you. Do you need the extra hour (or four) of sleep (maybe you do need the sleep, I don’t know your life) or do you need the exercise? What will you wish you had done when you are 80?

For right now, my self care is going to look like going to sleep before midnight. I really want to stay up until 2am eating popcorn and watching “The Office” but I’m going to the gym in the morning where the whippersnapper will tell me to lift more heavy things and if I’m sleepy, I’ll drop them.  Possibly on my own foot or head. I’m going to choose now to mother myself, to give myself what I actually need instead of what I want.

I’ll leave you with this parting gift. A picture of me back squatting 135lbs last winter. Can you even handle the sexy?!?

 

First let me say, I was a late reader and I think I am a better reader for it. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject and nothing has convinced me that early reading is inherently better for the student. I am 100% OK with my kids being late readers or just learning to read at their own pace, be it early or late or somewhere in between. There are a lot of complex neurological things that have to happen for someone to be ready to read and trying to force the issue can be very damaging, I should know.

That said, my 9 year old hadn’t made any progress in reading in 2 years. He’d learned his letters about 3 times over and forgotten them as many times. He was frustrated and angry with himself and frankly, so was I. I was worried that I’d forever crippled him by teaching him wrong, by being too relaxed about reading, by not being relaxed enough about reading, by not intervening, by intervening too soon. The hamster wheel of anxiety in my head was whirling so fast and I knew I could no longer be this child’s reading teacher.

That is a sucky realization to come to when you are your child’s teacher. I had tried everything I could think of and it wasn’t working and my sweet baby boy thought he was stupid for not being able to read. My frustration and insecurity had rubbed off on him which is a really sucky realization to come to as a parent.

Then, I went to a baby shower…

This sweet woman sat next to me in a church decorated with more pink than anyone would think possible. We knew each other casually through church and she knew I helped run a homeschool group. She asked if I knew anyone looking for a reading tutor because she had time during the day and had no homeschool students. I nearly ripped the business card out of her hand.

So now my boy has been going to her for nearly 6 months. He’s reading at his grade level, he reads to his younger siblings every night, he reads every sign we pass on the street, he reads things over my shoulder while I’m meandering through facebook. He’s even reading a vintage car manual because he loves machines and wants to know more about them.

I. Can’t. Even…

My older daughter was a late reader too and sometime around when she turned 8, a switch flipped and she went from struggling through Dr. Seuss to reading the whole Harry Potter series in a year’s time. I kept waiting for that to happen with my son but he is a different kid, he needed help to flip the switch.

So, here is what I’m trying to remember from all of this.

1. Needing assistance doesn’t make me a bad homeschool mom
2. Its fortunate that we were able to both find and afford help when we needed it
3. Needing assistance doesn’t make me a bad homeschool mom
4. Repeat 1 and 3 as often as necessary

In our perfect, fantasy homeschool, we would be able to be all things to all of our kids and find it within ourselves to give them whatever it is that they need to be successful academically. That and our children would come skipping and singing joyfully to the dining room table every day looking forward to the beautiful lessons you prepared that would always go exactly to plan. Also, our pet unicorn would magically correct everyone’s spelling. As fun as that sounds, it’s not real life.

Sometimes there’s someone else who is just better at this than you are and that’s ok.  Our reading tutor does this all day long. She’s taught hundreds of struggling readers and I will never be as good at this as she is. I don’t need to be, that’s not my job. My job is to do my best for my kids and sometimes that means finding them other people who can help them better than I can.

So this may make me loose followers (all 3 of them) but these are two things I feel very strongly about. I am on the board of a secular homeschool group, I’m one of the founding members and I have been a part of it’s leadership since it was a facebook post and an idea. I am also a person who does her best to follow Jesus and teach my children to do the same. I believe these two things are not mutually exclusive and I recognize that I am in the minority.

So here’s why I am not here for most of the Christian homeschool groups/co-ops that I’ve experienced. These groups are doing good work, they are teaching interesting classes and the people are kind and hardworking and lovely. I have friends who are in these groups and I’ve even helped to lead one. I am no longer here for Christian homeschooling groups because of the required statement of faith.

Here’s one example of why I’m not down with the SOF (Statement of Faith is long). I have a good friend who is Mormon and is homeschooling her 5 kids. She is smart and kind and willing to take on all kinds of grunt teaching that most moms don’t want to do (I’m looking at you Math). She also takes her faith seriously so she could’t sign the SOF at a Christian homeschool group and thus her whole family was barred from this group and they lost out on an excellent teacher. She couldn’t agree to a minor point of trinitarian doctrine so they wouldn’t let her teach math. Let that sink in.

I also know many homeschool families who have been burned by church or church people. It sucks but it’s real. They don’t want anything to do with church but they still feel that homeschool is the best option for their kids. The homeschool world is still dominated by Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians, so much so that before we started our group, the nearest secular group was an hour away. That means that if you’re one of the many people who have been hurt by church or just aren’t a Christian, you are on your own.

The SOF becomes a gatekeeper blocking you and your children from having access to all the great things that homeschool groups give to us. I am not here for the gatekeeping when it means people doing a lonely job have even less access to support.

And this is the crux of why I think a secular, inclusive homeschool group is so freaking important. Homeschool can get really, really lonely for you and your kids. Having access to a group gives you an outlet for socialization, a place to ask questions, a way to share experiences and examples of what all this looks like. That is a terrible thing to deny someone simply because they don’t share your religious beliefs.

Furthermore, I speculate that this is not how Jesus would run a homeschool group. Jesus didn’t require full agreement from the crowds before he let the children come through. He didn’t exclude people from his life who didn’t meet his standard. I can’t imagine that would have changed had he been a parent.

In the old testament it says to teach children the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it. I want my children to follow Jesus AND welcome people of different faiths as friends. I want them to see people as bearers of the image of God even if those people don’t believe in God. I don’t ever want them to use religion as a barrier to full fellowship and love between them and someone else because I don’t think that’s what Jesus intended us to do. It certainly isn’t how he lived.

Many Christian parents start out homeschooling because they have this strong urge to shelter their kids from the crappy parts of the world. I share that impulse, I totally get it. You have these sweet, innocent little people and you don’t want them to ever know about things like school shootings or child predators. You don’t want those things to ever be a part of their world. But when we tell our kids that we stay away from the world because it is evil, they will think we have lied when they go out into it and find good.

I have many friends who would make jokes about lightening striking them should they ever cross the threshold of a church and I have seen unspeakable kindness come from them. I’ve seen my non believing friend care for the sick, clothe the naked, feed the poor and comfort the lonely. I would have missed out on the beauty of their friendship had I stayed in the bubble my well meaning parents wished for me. We do our children a disservice when we shelter them from the world. There is too much good out there and we don’t want them to miss out on it.

It is so much easier when we can separate things out with clear lines. Christians=good, everybody else=not as good. But we all know those lines don’t work and you don’t need to look very far to see examples. It is so much harder to teach our kids to analyse character when they are choosing friends, it’s harder to teach them to walk back a friendship that has become negative, it’s harder to hold beliefs that differ and to co-exist. It creates a cognitive dissonance that is uncomfortable but it’s something that we must get used to because the world we live in requires it.

So, if I am the representative of Jesus in this world, I want people to see me loving and supporting anyone who needs it. If they ask me why I will tell them (or maybe just direct them to this post) but otherwise I will love them as I have been loved and leave it up to Jesus to fill in the details. Loving and supporting people has a domino effect just like gatekeeping and exclusion. If I am wrong, let me be wrong on the side of loving and serving my fellow (wo)man. I will take that risk, I hope you will too and I hope our kids are watching.

My house is actually kind of clean at the moment. By house, I mean just the main floor and by kind of clean, I mean that we vacuumed and dusted but there is a stack of laundry hidden in my pantry. The kids rooms are, well, who knows.

 

How did this miracle of domestic competence happen? It all started out on Saturday morning when I decided to not get out of bed but lay there futzing around on my phone until 10. Then I took a good long time eating breakfast, making coffee, more futzing on the phone. By the time we started cleaning, our slated activity for the day, it was past noon. Also, we had friends coming at 4.

I started out very sweetly giving instructions to my minions/children. One was to clean the living room. This is her regular chore which she constantly avoids until it gets so bad that I force the issue. Forcing the issue is usually greeted by a loss of spinal rigidity and a look of shock and surprise. But today was different. I said “go clean the living room” in my sweet mommy voice and she said (If you can believe it) “Ok, Mom!” What!?!?!

My other children were given their marching orders in a similar sweet tone and responded reasonably well and I thought maybe, just maybe, we could have a chill cleaning day where no one would cry or shout and the scary mom voice would remain a distant memory.

By 3pm the scary mom voice was out as I arbitrated the 4th fight of the day and dried the tears of yet another victim of sibling violence. It was around then that I began to wonder, as I stared around the still messy living room, is a tidy home worth this? Should I just do it myself and forget about teaching the kids to clean when it causes so much strife?

Ultimately, I do think it’s worth it for the kids to be responsible for taking care of our home but I really wish it came with fewer tantrums. Maybe there are children out there who can work together like the woodland creatures cleaning the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs but my children are not them. Cleaning makes them grumpy and they lash out when another kids so much as walks by. They will find the absolute stupidest things to fight over and provoke each other into full scale war with a look.

I don’t have any advice or wisdom to offer here, just putting out what is real right now. I keep hoping that they will at least learn enough about cleaning to be competent at it in their own homes. Either that or they will grow up hating it so much that they will turn their own homes into scary hoarder nests that have to be cleaned out by government officials while they are taken into a facility for psychiatric evaluation. These are the things that keep this momma up at night.

 

I’ve written recently about the need for homeschool mothers to take care of themselves, even when it is difficult to do so. I have a few more thoughts on that so here they are.

1. I am now (usually) attending the 5:30am crossfit class. To anyone who knows me, this is the last thing they ever thought I would type. Saying that I am not a morning person is a gross understatement. In high school I used to have whole conversations with my mother when she called up the stairs to make sure I was up. I have no memory of those conversations because my sleep-in impulse was so strong that I could have those conversations while still asleep. Yeah, I’m really not a morning person. That said, just because that has always been true, doesn’t mean it has to be true now. Don’t place BS expectations or limitations on yourself without fully trying something out. I never thought I could do an early morning class, shoot, I used to think my 8am French class was inhumane, but I tried it anyway and I’m glad I did because it works into my life so much better than my old 9am class did.
2. I graduated from Therapy. My therapist and I agreed that it was time to try life on my own. It’s good but I’m still working to find some kind of balance without the assistance of my Therapist. I tend to numb myself out with TV rather than thinking through whatever is making me feel something. I’m working to find ways to take care of myself without having someone whose job it is to make me think about stuff. That said, it’s nice to have the time back.
3. I’ve started running. I started listening to the podcast (Not Your Average Runner on itunes) and the speaker is all about encouraging women to run in the body you have right now. She made it sound fun and possible so I’ve started running using her 6 week beginner plan. I’m actually enjoying it (Weird!) and I ran a 5k last weekend. I came in 3rd in my age group (I’m pretty sure there were 4 of us but I’ll take it.) I find I can really think stuff through while I’m running, even when I’ve got early aughts hip hop playing in my ears. This is good for me (see #2) and running is something I never thought I’d be able to do again (see #1). I have another 5k scheduled for early September and I’m working toward improving my  (super slow) time.

So yeah, all in all I’m feeling pretty positive about myself just now. I’m seeing the benefits of all those positive vibes in my parenting. I’m over all more patient with the kids during school, I’m more present and willing to engage. That’s what they seem to need most right now so I’m glad I’ve got it in reserve. There were times last year that I didn’t. Apparently, that stupid cliche “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” is true. Who knew?

Super sexy post race face. It was ugly and messy but I did it anyway and I’m glad I did. There is value in doing the stuff that scares you. Be scared, but do it anyway.