Week of November 11-17: Dear Diary, Here’s What I Got Done Yesterday and What Else I’ve Been Up To Lately
Here’s What I Got Done Yesterday
Painted two bedrooms almost completely. I only have a little bit left in one bedroom to finish (mostly corners around the ceiling and touch-ups to any thin spots in the paint on the walls, and one small section of the wall that I haven’t gotten to yet because there wa furniture still in front of it), and in the other bedroom one and a hlf walls left (unless I decide to also paint the closet doors, but I am unsure if I am going to also paint the closet doors the same color to match the rest of the room). I also got mosot of the ceilings in both rooms. The ceilings are going to match the walls because both rooms (the kids’ rooms) are each being painted a dark color (one room in a deep, dark blue and the other room a deep, dark emerald green color) and after the rooms are painted I am going to paint stars on the ceiling of both rooms and then also add glow-in-the-dark paint to the stars so the kids all have rooms with a “night sky” full of stars at bedtime.
What Else I’ve Been Up To Lately
I’ve been organizing the house and doing my autumn cleaning that I have been doing each year for a while. It never made sense to me to only do a “spring cleaning” where the house was given more attention only once a year. If spring cleaning was once intended to get all of the dust build up and stale air out of the house that had built up over the winter while the house was all shut up and no windows open so that the house could stay warm all winter (though nowadays that’s no longer what folks refer to when the say they are doing their “spring cleaning”), then it makes just as much sense to do teh same during autumn, before the weather outside gets too cold, so that the house can be “swept out” and the stale air that was trapped inside over the summer while trying to keep the heat of summer out of the house just the same way with closed windows and exterior doors.
It’s already getting too cold already to really open up the house and air it up very much (it’s November in Utah, afterall), and it’s past the time of the autumn season where I would have aired out the house already, but I am still trying to do the deep cleaning and organizing aspects of my Fall season “autumn cleaning” tradition. So cleaning, organizing and tidying up I have. I’ve also been trying to finally decorate the house. We’ve lived here for almost 4 years now (early February will be 4 years) and we still haven’t really put up any decor. It doesn’t help that we haven’t ever really had much by way of home decor-We had spent so many years where we couldn’t even afford something small from the dollar store to decorate with. It feels amazing to finally be able to start decorating the house. I’ve waited for 15 years to be able to decorate the hosue. The best I had ever accomplished in the past was to partially decorate one half of one room (the living room) and hope that one day I’d be able to add at least a few decorative items to each room, not just one.
I was able to actually hang picture frames this past week. I can describe how that feels for me right now. I was also able to purchase a few paintings about a month or so ago, which had been sitting on the floor up against the wall in the kitchen, and was able to hang those also this past week.
I also recently thought up a way to sovle the problem of the dogs always jumping on the sofa and getting it muddy. Thankfully, our sofas have washable slip covers. But washing them frequently is both exhausting and overwheling. Not to mention unreasonable. So I finally figured out a way to keep them off of the sofas without being an ogre about it or having to reprimand either of the dogs (we have 2 dogs).
I have also been working on building better, healthier, and more productive habits without overwhelming myself or casuign myself to “run faster than I have ability to run”. I don’t want to “run myself ragged”, as Grandma Black used to say. But I’ve been working on building more consistent daily habits and more strucuted days. My daily routine is not super consistent when it comes to a schedule or time management, and it hhas been for a few years. It’s really wearing me down to not have structured days. I know a lot of people don’t like a structured schedule for their daily routine and rhythm, and many people advocate against any amount of ragidity in a daily schedule because it doesn’t work for them so they think it doesn’t work for anyone else either, but some people really do thrive with a more structured daily schedule. I am one of those people, and strangely enough, so is my husband and all of our kids. We thrive with a structured day and we crave the stability and predicatability of such a daily routine when we fall out of that kind of daily rhythm. I know that there are many people who don’t understand how anyone could thrive let alone survive a structured day like me and my family does, but our family is full of neuro-peculiar (“neurodiverse) people and our brains and bodies thrive when tthe amjority of our days are predictable more than spontaneous. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do things spontaneously, or that the occasional disruption in our daily schedule is going to make our world crumble. No, we strive to be flexible when its necessay and to be resilient in everything. But if we have no schedule or a daily schedule where each of our daily tasks is at an inconsistent time of the day, that is when our family gets stressed. We have more meltdowns (actual meltdowns, not temper tantrums), more emotional disregulation, and more difficulty focusing on tasks and not feeling overwhelmed. But we’ve been focuisng on pinpointing exactly what works and doesn’t work for each of us as individuals and collectively as a family and working on building habits around that knowledge to help us each thrive. It’s a lot of work, especially with each family member having varying needs, but its been soooo worth it to have our family thriving again.
I’ll try to find a moment later to reflect back some more and see if I can remember anything else that has been going on in my life lately. I’m sure there is plenty more, but I need to get off of my laptop here and get a few things done around the house. Oh! Like homeschooling! I can’t remember if I wrote this down anywhere already or not, but we’ve tansitioned back to homeschooling again. All three kiddos are homeschooling now. I’m so happy and excited to homeschool again this year. I have so many ideas for educational activities, field trips, and teaching/learning methods that I’ve been making a list of that I’d like to try out in our homeschooling endeavors.
Until I write again,
-Stacy
