Friday thoughts 9//14/2018

I am extremely ready for the weekend. How ready?

Yesterday, I put the potatoes in the Instant Pot. I sat down on the chair when they had 13 minutes left to cook, 13 minutes before the Instant Pot would beep.

Then I fell asleep.

That's how ready I am.

So happy Friday, everyone! Hopefully you have a weekend full of rest, relaxation, fun, or whatever it is you need. Here's a few of the things I found interesting this week.

*Declutter Kitchen Table: Hall of Fame*

I will readily admit that my kitchen table regularly looks like one of the Before photos here. Heaped with papers, piled with books, covered in half-finished art projects, it looks terrible and is impossible to eat at, which makes me sad. It feels like the kitchen table should be the heart of the home, but mine is what FlyLady refers to as a 'hotspot.' It's not my hotspot, but the other people in the family absolutely dump their stuff there, and I've been making a concerted effort to keep at least the table top clean and free of the stuff, partially thanks to this article. It's not perfect (the right side still has all my husband's mail on it; I've run out of solutions for places to put that. Mail racks didn't work because he just ignores it; putting it on his desk just ensures that it'll pile up and look terrible there. If anyone has any advice on this, I'm all ears!), but it's a lot better than it used to be.

The pumpkins came from our garden. :)

Do you struggle with keeping your kitchen table clear? How have you learned to deal with this?

*This Is What Self-Care Really Means, Because It's Not All Salt Baths And Chocolate Cake*

I hadn't ever really thought of self-care as a thing before it became a thing on the internet. I don't regularly take bubble baths (I'm not a fan of baths in general. Showers forever!), I don't do things like salon appointments or manicures (not my thing, but if it's yours, that's cool), I don't get lattes (I prefer the taste of coffee made at home) or bakery treats (I can bake them myself). I have friends who will post the things they bought while shopping as evidence of self-care, but that hasn't ever really been my thing. Self-care isn't something I've ever been great at; I've always had a hard time advocating for my own needs, and that's absolutely something I need to work on. That said, reading is a form of self-care for me, as is knitting. I didn't realize how much knitting is until lately, when I've gotten back into it. It relaxes me (despite having to rip things out when I make mistakes), and that's good for my mental health.

But it rings true to me that self-care is often about the difficult things. There's a time and place for chocolate cake or ice cream and bubble baths and that new pair of shoes, but I think there's more often a time for improving those parts of yourself that need improvement. 

I used to be messy. Really messy. It didn't bother me at all to have coats and clothing and books and papers scattered willy-nilly. It embarrassed me, but I had no idea how to go about changing into the kind of person who had a clean, less cluttered house. Until one day I decided I absolutely wanted to be that kind of person, and I set about looking for ways to become her. It's a work in progress and probably always will be, because this doesn't come naturally to me, but I've found that it benefits me in myriad ways (including being helpful for my anxiety when my home is clear of clutter and mess. That helps a LOT). This whole past summer, I've been re-organizing the house in ways that have made it much easier to keep tidy, and while it hasn't always been easy, it was absolutely an act of self-care. That was what I needed to keep my anxiety quiet(er), so I spent several months overhauling the house. 

Self-care. Caring for yourself. Sometimes it's chocolate cake and fuzzy slippers, and other times it's cleaning your laundry room and basement so that the very thought of them doesn't cause you terror anymore. :)

*Why Frumpy Makes You Grumpy*

Oof. 

This spoke to me this week.

First things first: there's some religious content in the article, but if you're not religious, it can still work for you, so don't let that throw you off. 

Now.

How I dress varies, and lately, it's been a bit...schlumpy. There are reasons for that. A large part of it has been because of my back pain. It's hard to make a ton of effort to look cute when you're finding it painful to walk (although I will admit that oftentimes, long skirts are more comfortable for me when I'm in pain, for multiple reasons, not limited to the fact that the waistband of low-rise pants is where a lot of my pain is, so...yeah. Not comfy). And this week, for whatever reason, I became aware of how it was making me feel. Messy. Unattractive. Sloppy. That's not to say that I looked awful- I try not to leave the house looking a mess!- but I felt kind of gross. So when I came across this article, I went, "Huh. You know..."

With physical therapy making a huge improvement in my pain levels, I felt up to the challenge, and so, instead of throwing on my capris or khaki shorts (which, honestly, have probably seen better days and aren't all that flattering on me), I got a little fancier.

Thrift store skirt!

This was my outfit for grocery shopping. I kind of floated around all day and felt super cute and light and airy, and my husband complimented my choice of clothing, which felt pretty nice. It really did make a difference in my mood, at least that day. 10/10, would do it again.

So I did.

Thrift store skirt, yard sale shirt! I think the sandals were thrifted as well. :)

I wore this out to lunch with my mom today. And I'll pick out something else nice for tomorrow as well. Because the weather is nice, I'm feeling less pain, and it's nice to wear something that makes me feel good.

Does what you wear make a difference in how you feel? 

*Homemaking Is For Everyone*

I liked this, for a number of reasons. Homemakers don't fit into a single box. We're old and young, child-free and leading around a gaggle of children. We love to cook and hate it (but probably still do it!), we're crafty and not, we're religious and atheist or agnostic. Homemakers come in all shapes and sizes and forms.

For some of us, it comes naturally. Some of us were raised with the skills we'd need; others of us (*waves furiously*) had to scrape together the skills from books, internet sources, videos, and studying the home lives of our friends and family. Some of us are quick learners; others of us (*raises hand again*) took...uh...some time to get there. 

I appreciate the author pointing out that so much of what we do is invisible labor, that no one notices what we do until we stop doing it. If I don't do the stuff I do all day every day, the dishes pile up, the table ends up covered in mail and art projects, my daughter's toys procreate like rabbits in every room of the house, the laundry threatens to spill out onto the road, and dinner turns into nachos every night (which isn't to say that that wouldn't be delicious, but it definitely wouldn't be healthy). This is one of the more frustrating aspects of being a homemaker, the fact that your work, the work you exhaust yourself over and cause yourself pain to do (*rubs aching back*) just doesn't look like work if you keep doing it all day, every day. Is it valuable? Yes. Does society as a whole value it? Nope, unless, again, you stop doing it and the house needs to be condemned because it's overrun with rats or the crew from Hoarders shows up. I admit that I struggle with this.

So to all the bloggers and writers, to the people who have created content that helped me understand how to better run my home, how to be a better cook, how to better organize everything so that it runs more smoothly, to all of you who have helped me to become a better homemaker, THANK YOU!!! I'm always looking to improve the way I manage things around here, so I very much appreciate it. All of you have helped me to understand that homemaking is indeed for everyone. Homemaking is for me, too. :)

So...Little bit of a computer snafu this week. Monday's weekly recap is going to look a little bit different than normal, because my computer ate the log I keep of my daily activities! I'll still have an overview of the week, with updates on a few things, and I'm going to try to get another post or two up this week, because I have a few things I'd like to talk about. 

Maybe your weekend be everything you need it to be!