Lame Duck

O.K. folks, here we are, officially in "Lame Duck" season...the time between Christmas and New Year's Eve when resolutions are born and old habits prepare to die.  I've never been one to make and keep resolutions, but this year, I'm holding myself accountable.  I really need to change my mindset.  I'm constantly stuck in this vicious circle of "brilliant" ideas that never come to fruition, closets that never get organized, kid crafts that go horribly wrong, and general malaise for everyday life.  I'm a dreamer, I spend most of my day day-dreaming of what I could be doing, should be doing, but I just hang there like a dense fog, taking up space and doing nothing.  I started this blog (years ago now) after a recommendation from a therapist to journal to motivate self-change.  I have a notebook, a sacred notebook, that I keep with me always, but it's meant for ideas, not the mundane chaos of my daily life.  I was supposed to write on this blog, to put myself out there---his thinking was that if I made my ideas public I would hold myself accountable and actually produce the things I wrote about.  Not so, my friends.  My brain is far too tricky for that...first I would only write about things I had  finished already, then I put off writing altogether because I knew I'd never accomplish the things I was writing about.  That brings me back to New Years Resolutions.
I'm like an old car...one that you have to roll and then kick-start while shifting gears.  I need momentum to get going.  I can't just whip out a resolution on New Year's Eve and start it the next day.  So I'm taking this time to build up my momentum.  Putting this experiment out there is actually kind of scary.  The accountability.  I second guess myself so often that I talk myself right out of doing the things I want to do.  This time though, I have a plan.  I've joined some online FB groups that support creativity, I bought a physical day-planner so that I can mark off and see the time I have to work on a project, and I'm in the middle of hiring a reliable sitter.
I'm hoping that this project, this time I will spend "Wrestling My Muse", will be therapeutic as well.  I tend not to be too public about it, but I do have a mental illness.  It's getting worse, not better, with age and I think that some of my depressive episodes can be linked directly to not giving fruition to an idea that's nagging me on the inside.  That said, I know that in my manic moments the ideas flow forth from an unfettered faucet and I can scarcely keep up.
So that's it friends, I'm officially on the mat.  Wrestling my soul to the ground to eek out whatever nuggets of beauty may reside inside. Wish me luck.

The Beauty in Procrastination

At this point, I have several things of importance hanging over my head.  I have a list of 20 or so churches that I am supposed to deliver flyers to.  I have my website to design and launch, the paperwork to incorporate my business needs to be filled out and filed, and a social media campaign to launch.  I have a half-dozen entries to finish for various writing and art competitions.  There's also the book(s) that are waiting patiently for publication, and I have to outline what I will be teaching in class next week.

Today, I thought that making up-cycled activity boards for my toddler and 1 year old far out weighed "that lot" by comparison.  The idea popped in my head from constantly looking (or trying not to look) at the disconfigured cardboard box in the corner of our livingroom that had, until last night, held every piece of mail that we had accumulated in the past year.  Hubby and I had had a mad, panic-driven dumpster dive of an evening trying to find the baby's social security card in order to file our taxes (I was SO SURE that I had filed it away).   Nope. It was in the box.

At any rate, there were two perfectly usable sides to that cardboard box that were serendipitously in the shape of tri-fold presentation boards.  Then I spied some colored popsicle sticks on the counter from a craft project last week.  And some feathers.  And aluminum foil...stickers...felt...and my trusty glue gun.  

For about 30 minutes, my toddler and I were a whirlwind of sticker backings and ribbon strips, feathers, foil, and string.  I dabbed glue here and there, smoothed out the foil, added a few spongy letters and numbers, and--Viola!--a learning and activity board for $0.

The kids explored them hapily, River pointing out to Torrin that there was an "O" in the name "Torrin" and that the Elmo stickers on Torrin's board were, in fact, River's.  All in all, I gained a happy 10 minutes of total free time upon completion of the boards, another 15 of partial free time (stating "take turns" to the boys with their boards), and then the shit hit the fan and I had to referee an all-out war over the scratch-board use on the baby's board. 

It was fun while it lasted.

Peace,

Sarah