IT'S MY JOB TO TAKE CARE OF ME

After Thanksgiving Break, I was beat.  Exhausted.  Plum worn out.  We got home from Wichita right at the kids' bed time on Sunday night, and we jumped immediately back into life.  By the end of driving them home, I was really wanting someone to just take care of me.  I didn't want to have to do anything for anybody, including myself.

Shocker - that is not how things went.  In fact, after the solid week of people and traveling and lack of routine (which I mostly loved!), no one was super cooperative about bed time or kicking off our week.  I was so cranky about this, and I took some of that out on John.  After all, he had been home for the past two days (with no kids - I might add!), shouldn't he be perfectly cheerful and ready to do all of the things?  (No thought to the fact that he had been fighting off illness and also helping to manage Black Friday at a mall. . .) (Or the fact that he had put Christmas lights on our house and had our three Christmas trees up when I got home . . .) 🤦🏻‍♀️

After being a brat and sulking for a bit, I had an epiphany.  It is my job to take care of me.  No one else can do it.  Only me.

I am the only one who can make myself go to bed.  I am the only one who can go to exercise class.  I am in charge of what I eat.  Those three factors alone make up a huge part of how I feel on a regular basis.  I also have a large influence over our general schedule, and certainly my daily schedule - it is on me when I over do all the things.

So, I am working on doing the things that will actually result in a more rested, healthy self.  Not a single thing is rocket science.  It just takes more discipline that I like to generally exercise over myself.  I do not like having a bedtime.  I don't like to not be able to eat all the dessert all the time.

But, the truth of the matter is that I am not as young as I once was, and I need consistent sleep to not feel like a monster.  I feel infinitely better when I am eating things that were grown more often than things that were baked.  No one can do it for me, and if I don't do it for myself, then I fail at all the things I do for others.  I am not the wife or mother or friend or person that God has called me to be.

It is frustrating to feel like I have to re-learn the same things over and over again, and obviously, none of this is new information.  But, I do feel as if I am making some headway with actual changes, one at a time.  I am going to bed at night by a certain time, and we have also banned phone use in bed.  I don't need to scroll through Instagram or Pinterest or Amazon before drifting to sleep.  Usually, I am wasting time, and as a night owl, it is easier to keep thinking of things I want to do or see instead of going to sleep.

I actually started this blog post early last week, but with the new bedtime and also trying not to do every single little thing, I am just now getting around to posting it.  Which is perfectly fine.  (I try to believe, because there are still large parts of me that want to try to do everything. . .)  I've got lots of other things I want to catch up this blog on, but I've also got cookies in the works and Christmas cards and laundry, and there really are only so many hours in the day.

I know New Year's is right around the corner, but who says we can't start now?  Here's to making this the most rested holidays we've ever had.