Season 2 is here!

After a little transition time between the summer and the new school year, I’m back with another podcast episode! As you can imagine, things didn’t turn out quite as I expected over the long holiday and I wanted to recap my expectations vs my reality and how I square them for myself.

If you’d rather watch YouTube, you can hop over here.

What Worked

* Adding events to the calendar

* This is huge for me because I’m an “out of sight, out of mind” kind of gal, so making sure the big events we want to do are on the calendar, meant that they weren’t missed.

* The biggest one was the Ann Arbor Art Fair, which continues to be one of my favorite things about living here. It was a perfect day.

* Christmas in July

* The Snart activity for July was my favorite so far! I cannot express the joy that it brought me

* We visited Frankenmuth, made crafts, bought holiday fabric and I even did Christmas nails!

* Morning Pages

* I held space for this practice during the break and whenever I chose to let it go in favor of a lie-in, I felt the difference.

* This small ritual in the morning is necessary to my well being now!

* Small crafts

* Making beaded earrings was my crafty lifeline throughout the break.

* Being able to complete a project from start to finish is another necessity for my brain.

* Vlogging!

* I am so glad that I recorded videos each week during the summer! Having a record of our days helped me to see how much we actually did, even if it wasn’t what we’d planned.

* Feeling productive and sharing our life was really fun, too.

What Didn’t Work

* Strict weekly schedule

* I love planning a weekly schedule, but keeping to it is a totally different exercise.

* When I don’t follow through with my carefully laid plans, there are definitely feelings of failure that pop up. I had to let those go this summer.

* Regular day trips

* I have a kid who loves being home. He’d much rather read and build LEGO sets than run around town.

* And our days ended up being shorter than I expected. We’d sleep in longer than expected (a blessing and a curse), his limited screen time would blend in to lunch and then we just didn’t have enough time to go out before it was time to start dinner. Again…learning to let go.

* Long-term projects

* I just couldn’t rustle up the dopamine to get to all of my neglected, long-term projects.

* Sometimes it’s ok to kick the can down the road a bit and let your future self figure it out.

* Anything that required recurring plans

* I think we’ve establish that the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. I love making them, but when you’re a parent, you have to hold everything very loosely.

* This is something I’d like to work on in the future. When my schedule works, it makes things easier for me, but when it’s too much, everything goes out the window.

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