A bit of hither and yon

The Peanuts are in great shape, and sassy as sass monsters, and all seems well and ready to roll for Xmas at our house.

I think _I_ am ready for Xmas, I think?

There's a thing at work, where money is tight, and I'm stopping being slow, because my joy in my work came from getting things done, and I'm not doing a lot of that.

I used to get a jump out of _solving_ problems, and I don't seem to be able to do that these days with people being so cautious to do anything.

It feels like one of those moments where we can, with some effort, push forward hard into a new way of doing things.

Peanut #2

So Peanut #2 is a very energetic young child, and this has started to cause some minor issues:

1) She cannot concentrate for long, often. But she can, sometimes.
2) She cannot. stop. talking. for. 10. seconds. This is causing some stress in the school system.
3) The combination of not concentrating and not shutting up is making it difficult to teach things.

So I shall approach this in the Familial Way: I shall read to her, and only her thank you very much Peanut #1 get out of our faces please, on her own, every night, so that she gets used to sitting and absorbing. And we may even keep track of her siting and concentrating and reward her accordingly.

Xmas busyness

So far so good with not hating Christmas! Yay!

We had a lovely morning yesterday all at home together, like domestic bliss. It was cool! Then we got crazy super busy again, as we do. But the morning was super.

It becomes... it becomes a challenge to our commitment to Church, unfortunately.

Because it is our _only_ unencumbered family time... .well, ok, maybe Sunday afternoons. But those are also prime errand times.

Anyway, it was nice, and I've bought some essential Christmas presents and not hated humanity and that's all good.

Dance break!

Ok, I realized that to achieve my goal of dancing in 5 years, I need to dance 4 hours a week.
That's a lot!

Ok, the other thing is that I watched the Peanuts' dance classes today, and that's literally the level of dance instruction I need to do.

I wonder if there's "little kids dance class for grownups"

From this time last year:

"So one of the behaviours I am attempting to extinct in myself is losing my temper. I mean, sometimes you gotta yell at your kids, right, sure, but I always want to make sure that  I am in control of when I do that, and sometimes I'm not. So I'm off to fix that.

But.. as I work to decrease the number of times I have a dad-tantrum, I find that I am, generally, grumpier. My peaks of anger have decreased, but my baseline is higher.  I mean, it could also be that I'm _exhausted_, which is a reasonable other variable that explain this.  But work shall continue."

I am now in much better shape, generally speaking. My temper is better, and my baseline is lower.

The key mantra is "I do not have to lower myself to the level of people who are angry with me (children, I'm looking at you...)" so I am getting better at managing my response to things.

A fall reflection

Well, here we are... another week gone by.

My self-regulation / self-care routine has been doing better, although my energy is still not where it should be, it's better.

We're having a bit of a house argument, but that's ok, it's nothing serious. And with a holiday coming up then it's a bit of a break for everyone, and maybe enough of us will have the day off that we can get a lot done!

I may actually need to re-roof my garage tomorrow with a private day off that I have

I mean, it just needs enough to get it through the winter.

Time away in the mountains

We went running!

We went walking!

We had a brief memorial for a friend's dad who died and there was no money in the family for a funeral.

It was very nice, and was a nice break. I actually felt like I was away from work, which was nice.