Balance and routine

My life has changed so much in the past five years. Marriage, taking and quitting jobs, pregnancy and babies, renting/buying/selling houses, losing loved ones, getting into and then delaying grad school.

My whole life I've been a write. Never professionally, but writing down my life is definitely my go-to coping skill. If I write at night, I always sleep better. If I get stressed, I can let it go (at least for a while). I wrote some letters I'd been thinking about for months now. I even have stamps in my purse. I'll probably send them tomorrow. So I'm going to write again.

This Saturday would have been my first day of Trevecca's Marriage and Family Counseling/Therapy program. However, over the last couple of weeks I realized that I currently cannot balance grad school, a full time job, and having a husband and kids. It would be really terrible to be studying to be a marriage and family therapist, and yet never spend time with my husband or kids. So I deferred a semester while I adjust to working a full time Youth Villages job. I'm ever so glad I did.

Because I did not start grad school yesterday, I spend a lot of this weekend working and working and working and working to catch up on paperwork and house work. What a relief to not be able to think of anything else I could do right away for work. I'm sure there is, but for today, I'm done. I also got some lunches made, cleaned the kitchen, got my pump ready to bring to work with me, got the kids stuff ready, and I folded and put away all our laundry. I got more house work done this weekend than I have in the past 8 months since August was born. I'm pretty sure that's true.

I also exercised. That pretty much never happened. You know what I did? I ate sugar. Adara asked me for a cookie, and Alex asked me to make healthier ones. We've been trying to eat healthier again. So I made chocolate chip pan cookies with almond flour and organic sugar and organic chocolate chips and real vanilla. Same amount of sugar, but organic and gluten free. I was almost bouncing off the walls and found new motivation for life. Adara joined right in. Exercising together used to be our everyday thing. (note: eating sugar also puts me in a TERRIBLY stressed mood. However, I convinced Alex to keep the kids away while I fueled my stress into cleaning.)