Some overwhelm

UGH, I am feeling a little overwhelmed right now. I hate saying that, because honestly, my life is really not that difficult (at ALL) compared to so many others’.

Still, I have had a definite feeling of some “overwhelm” going on for a while now. I think I generally handle busy-ness fine, maybe better than average?? I’m pretty used to it. But it catches up with me now and then.

Brainstorming some reasons why:

1. Life feels very full again. The pandemic slowdown is pretty much officially OVER in our household, besides I guess virtual piano lessons remaining. Weekends/ evenings have been full, we’ve had a bunch of family commitments/ activities and my calendar has a lot of writing on it for the next couple months, too.

2. My house feels disorganized. This GRATES on me big time. I feel like every cabinet, drawer, closet, etc. is a relative mess right now and I cannot stand it. Nothing is “terrible”….but I have this underlying buzzing feeling of general disorganization and it affects other areas of my life. I need to make a list and just start chipping away at organizing some of these areas, stat.

3. My time management has been a bit sucky lately. I have been failing to plan ahead. Most days have some combination of activity for the kids, appointments, etc. and I’m not doing a very good job of proactively planning for some of them. I probably need to do some shifting/reducing of some of my personal “leisure” activities that I normally fit into breaks during the school year. My breaks now end up getting eaten up with kid stuff, but I don’t always account for that fact.

4. I think I need to implement a mini-planning session the night before, instead of in the morning like I usually do. Sometimes the morning is too late! (i.e. some days I really need to use my early morning hours for WORK or my workout instead, if I have a busy day…but I haven’t done a great job of always planning for these switches away from my “usual” routine. By the time I realize that that’s what I should have done, sometimes the window of time has passed…)

5. The kids are generally fine and don’t require “watching” at their ages, but there is still mental energy involved with keeping tabs on them: what are they doing, did they do what I asked, are they on the ipad again?, did they leave a big mess in the kitchen and then just go outside?, what time do they need a ride somewhere, wait, did they ever eat lunch?? etc. etc.

6. I feel like I have a lot of work to do, including some things I need to catch up on that have snowballed a little. I would like to devote some extra, uninterrupted time to some of these tasks, but I haven’t felt that I’ve had enough of that kind of time lately.

I guess that’s my little brainstormed list of why I feel overwhelmed. Thank you for listening. 🙂

Daily Gratitude:

I am grateful for Ivan insisting on “taking me out for a drink” last night, even though I felt kind of tired and lazy and initially had said, “nah…”. We went to a cute local brew pub and in true Wisconsin fashion, we had beers and cheese curds. We also grabbed the game Battleship from the shelf (this place intentionally has zero TVs anywhere in it and instead has games and cards for people to play) and we played a round. (I lost 😦 )