... Eaten by a Dragon
Jun. 28th, 2019 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_rose(I have no dragon icon! And the gryphon is a protective spirit, so I guess phoenix it is.)
Well, the "reorganizing my life" plan was putting along okay, and sort of still is, except that this week had so many extra activities and snags and stiumbles I have declared it eaten by a dragon.
This makes slightly more sense than it seems. I gave myself cute sticker charts for tasks accomplished, and I have two sticker kinds. Owls for getting the jobs done, and Dragons for when I didn't, but had a genuine good reason why not.
The weekend was less than restful because my husband was sick, so I was semi-solo parenting, and I did myself no favours sleep-wise, so while nothing major went wrong, I never caught up on rest. I still maintained a few of the chart activities and got some owl stickers up. It just meant I wasn't ready for the next two days.
Monday was taken up with some heavy emotional fallout from what turned out to be an important e-mail sent to us vanishing into the aether. So I had time but not mental energy, and I spent part of the night showing Alex how to paint with his sparkle paints. (Facebook consensus seemed to be that the sparkly cat counted as a drawing for the purpose, too, though it was quicker and dirtier than my careful, detailed and shaded drawings to that point.)
Tuesday involved not one but THREE meetings after work: Joseph's IEP, a meeting with his daycare's manager because of some sudden reappearance of behavioural issues - either related to not taking the bus or related to resisting the fact that school is ending, or both - then the Folk Fest crew meeting. None of them were bad (Well, the behavioural meeting was a bit of a drag as we couldn't offer concrete answers, but we were all on the same page as far as wanting to help rather than cast blame) but I had no downtime until I got home.
We have had activities with people both nights since (and will continue to have over the whole weekend) which are both often pleasant and refreshing in other ways (One, for instance, really helped wash away the last of Monday's emotional weight), but do trouble my introvert side, and I have thus taken time I should be sleeping to instead have some non-sleep quiet time. Which at least once did involve mandolin practice (it helps that mandolins and drawing can be good quiet downtime activities in themselves; the fact that I didn't have *time* to do them as much as I ought is itself illustrative of the problem).
So. Week eaten by a dragon. I plan to spend any time we have between arrival home and time to leave for game tonight with the mandolin, and time at our RPG tonight sketching, which will help add a couple more owls, but I have also earned a couple of great big dragon stickers.
The thing with the dragons is, they are a way to say, "this exact task not achieved but it's OKAY." and short circuit the guilt spiral that can lead to skipping more tasks because not finishing tasks is BAD, no matter what else happens in the week. Because some weeks one is just lazy, and that should not be rewarded, but some weeks just get eaten, and a small reward for recognizing the difference can make a big difference.
Well, the "reorganizing my life" plan was putting along okay, and sort of still is, except that this week had so many extra activities and snags and stiumbles I have declared it eaten by a dragon.
This makes slightly more sense than it seems. I gave myself cute sticker charts for tasks accomplished, and I have two sticker kinds. Owls for getting the jobs done, and Dragons for when I didn't, but had a genuine good reason why not.
The weekend was less than restful because my husband was sick, so I was semi-solo parenting, and I did myself no favours sleep-wise, so while nothing major went wrong, I never caught up on rest. I still maintained a few of the chart activities and got some owl stickers up. It just meant I wasn't ready for the next two days.
Monday was taken up with some heavy emotional fallout from what turned out to be an important e-mail sent to us vanishing into the aether. So I had time but not mental energy, and I spent part of the night showing Alex how to paint with his sparkle paints. (Facebook consensus seemed to be that the sparkly cat counted as a drawing for the purpose, too, though it was quicker and dirtier than my careful, detailed and shaded drawings to that point.)
Tuesday involved not one but THREE meetings after work: Joseph's IEP, a meeting with his daycare's manager because of some sudden reappearance of behavioural issues - either related to not taking the bus or related to resisting the fact that school is ending, or both - then the Folk Fest crew meeting. None of them were bad (Well, the behavioural meeting was a bit of a drag as we couldn't offer concrete answers, but we were all on the same page as far as wanting to help rather than cast blame) but I had no downtime until I got home.
We have had activities with people both nights since (and will continue to have over the whole weekend) which are both often pleasant and refreshing in other ways (One, for instance, really helped wash away the last of Monday's emotional weight), but do trouble my introvert side, and I have thus taken time I should be sleeping to instead have some non-sleep quiet time. Which at least once did involve mandolin practice (it helps that mandolins and drawing can be good quiet downtime activities in themselves; the fact that I didn't have *time* to do them as much as I ought is itself illustrative of the problem).
So. Week eaten by a dragon. I plan to spend any time we have between arrival home and time to leave for game tonight with the mandolin, and time at our RPG tonight sketching, which will help add a couple more owls, but I have also earned a couple of great big dragon stickers.
The thing with the dragons is, they are a way to say, "this exact task not achieved but it's OKAY." and short circuit the guilt spiral that can lead to skipping more tasks because not finishing tasks is BAD, no matter what else happens in the week. Because some weeks one is just lazy, and that should not be rewarded, but some weeks just get eaten, and a small reward for recognizing the difference can make a big difference.
