This has just not been my week. I can’t believe it’s Friday already, but also am glad that it is.
Monday- Tuesday were spent feeling crummy with my cold, which got significantly more unpleasant as Monday progressed. I’ve sneezed about 7,246 times this week.
Tuesday I ended up logging off of work by 10 am and crawling into bed! I did have to attend a meeting at 1 pm, and I felt a little better by late afternoon, so I did a bit more work then. But I actually SLEPT for a couple hours during the day, which for me, is unheard of. And I was pretty worthless Tuesday night.
(Did yet another covid test just to check, and still negative, as the boys had been repeatedly as well last week. So truly “just a cold”. Also, I now can’t say “just a cold” without thinking of the Covid Horse Race video that people were sharing when omicron came onto the scene….just too funny…If you’ve seen the video, you’ll understand the “just a cold” reference. 😂) We are lucky because Ivan can bring basically unlimited covid tests home from work, so we have plenty on hand.
Finally felt better by Wednesday midday, and actually did a workout Wednesday afternoon! Thought the week was looking up, until I then proceeded to sleep ❤ hours Wednesday night. Booooooo. I felt so tired yesterday, it was just awful. My schedule had no time in it for a nap, because I had a haircut appointment in the afternoon, too.
It is crazy how our sleep affects our bodies. Doesn’t matter what we “want”, if we don’t get enough sleep, our bodies KNOW IT and respond accordingly. It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. You just cannot fool your body. We are delicate machines. Resilient, too, but ultimately quite sensitive to specific needs.
I was in bed by 7:50 p.m. last night, thank GOD! I slept from 8 pm- 5:30 am without waking up once. Dead to the world. Haha! Oh it felt so good though. I’m hoping for a better day today.
March – Social Media plans
I mentioned on my 22 for 2022 list that I wanted to experiment with different ways of using social media this year, a different way each month.
*January– I didn’t really do anything different/ was just thinking about it.
*February– My plan was to eliminate a fairly recent habit of grabbing my phone/ alarm clock when it would go off and then lying in bed scrolling around for 15+ minutes first thing in the morning. This was causing me to miss out on valuable early morning time/ made my personal time shorter and more rushed, etc. I was basically just comfy lying in bed and didn’t want to get up! But mindlessly scrolling Facebook isn’t an ideal way to start my day, anyway.
Result– I don’t know, exactly. This change did help me to get up and moving a bit more quickly, but sometimes I’d just lay there instead. Or I’d check my email! Doh. In terms of decreasing social media minutes, also not really sure. I feel like I just kind of ended up shifting that time to later in the day!
Although, my February totals were less overall (shorter month, though…)- an (embarrassing) 19.98 hours total in February, compared to 25.6 hours in January. 😬 (Hard to compare though- I spent a lot of time in January posting vacation pics…which racks up time fast.) This works out to 338 minutes less in February than January, total.
*March– Plan for March is to take a more hard line approach. I’m going back to the “timer” method. I’ve set my iPhone to limit Facebook/Instagram to a total of only 15 minutes per day! When time is up, it greys the apps out and I can’t log in (unless I override it, but I’m planning to NOT allow myself to do that!).
I’ve used the timer before in the past with general success. It is great for cutting out mindless scrolling. The only “negative” is that sometimes I like to say, read a longer thread or article on Facebook- which takes more time….and then my time runs out so fast! But I guess that’s the idea.
Assuming I stick to the 15 minutes/day, x 31 days in March, my total should be only 465 minutes for the whole month! That’s only 7.75 hours total, a drastic decrease from the ~20 hours I spent last month.
*I may end up taking the timer off during our trip though! I like to post vacation pics on FB, and I don’t know that I can do that in only 15 minutes. We’ll see.
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful to be feeling better AND for good sleep last night. Moving on….
GRATEFUL KAE 
sorry to hear that you had to fight a bad cold for so long. glad it’s just a real cold. hahaha…. not fun at all. and I fully agree that sleep is so important, probably to me after all research and trials, sleep makes the largest difference to my overall wellbeing followed by early dinner. the older I get, the more important is to have a good night sleep. the other I was chatting with my mom and she agrees, and she observes that her 80s years old friends that are active and healthy all sleep very well.
I haven’t checked my phone usage but I guess my instagram time is not much now that I put phone away at the bathroom after I brush my teeth. I’d be happy to join you for the media challenge. will post about it and keep track of the metric for mutual accountability 🙂
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Sounds good!! A big problem for me with social media is just checking it too often. I grab my phone I swear every 5 minutes (not really- but it feels like it) sometimes and find myself popping Facebook open. At least with the timer method, I can do that sometimes, but usually so far I run out of time earlier in the day/by afternoon time, so then I’m forced to completely not use it for the rest of the day! Haha. So it’s working so far.
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Ugh. Colds are the worst, especially with the added confusion layered on with COVID testing.
That horse video is hilarious and we quote it, almost daily (#totallyserious) in our house. Sudden Spike, sudden Spike. And Leave Them Kids Alone. It was just so well done!
Hope you catch up on lots of sleep this weekend!
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Hahahaa yes! Sudden spike! New Years Eve!!! And the leave them kids alone is hilarious! The guys voice is just priceless. 🤣🤣🤣
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I hadn’t heard of that video – probably because I have been off social media since early December! It is very funny! I am honestly shocked that we haven’t had covid. There have been so many times when I’ve thought – this has to be it. I wonder how many PCR tests my kids have had. I suppose I could count on their mychart accounts. But it would be too depressing. I know Will had 3 in the first week of January, then we gave him 3 at home last week and he got a PCR on Tuesday. Poor kids. The boys had their well-child appts on Friday and we talked about them ahead of time. I mentioned that the doctor will look at various things like, nose, ears, etc. Well apparently Paul got it in his mind that he was getting a covid test. probably because of all the times we’ve gone to the doctor in the past year, this is the one time he didn’t get a covid test! He HATES them so much that it takes 2 of us to hold him down to do it. And 2 to test Will, too – one holds his hands, the other his head. Good times… but hopefully we won’t need to do too many going forward. I am glad we have a healthy supply of tests at home. I am required to self-test once/week as part of the return to work protocol. It was super easy to order tests through insurance at CVS and I didn’t have to pay a thing. Woo hoo!
Anyways… I am sorry you were sick but I am glad you got this out of the way before your Europe trip! I hope Ivan stays healthy or gets it before the trip. What you had sounds similar to what I had in early December. I ended up taking 1.5 days off because I felt so awful and I slept for 4 hours one day between 2 naps and went to bed at 8:30! I totally agree on the importance of sleep. It’s been so awful recently in our house, and then we have a good stretch and I wonder how in the world I could possibly have been functioning on so little sleep/so many wake ups!
Good luck w/ the social media challenge for March. It will be good to experiment w/ different things! I think you should def give yourself a pass during vacation because I imagine you’ll mostly be posting about the trip and that can be helpful when you write a trip recap.
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