Ah, I expect today to be a “reset” day, after Epiphany.
I notice that whenever we are transitioning from one season of time to another, we have a day or two of course correction. I’ve learned to plan for this. Every Monday, academics are light and we focus on getting the house clean (since Sunday is a day of rest and we usually don’t do any housework beyond the minimum, plus I usually do the messy type of baking and cooking on that day).
But after a holiday season like Christmas, it will take more than one day to get back to “ordinary time”. Today we are cleaning the house. I will look at my calendar and try to plan for this week. I will get the boys back on track with math. I will do some lesson planning since I have some ideas for the next few months (holidays are great times for free-form brainstorming and new inspirations, but then the job is to get them into usable form!).
Most of all, I won’t expect things to be immediately restored to order. I’ve found that is a recipe for discouragement. I look at these transition times as what the medical community calls a “baseline”. You see what things REALLY look like; even maybe a little worse than they really are, but that gives lots of room for improvement. Then you can devise strategies to deal with the areas that look the worst, and celebrate ANY uphill movement.
I do the same thing with the scale. I weigh myself NOW. It looks kind of bad, of course, since it’s been the holidays. But then any course correction will look like improvement.
I will be walking around the house today, picking up all the things that are out of place, and putting away the last of the Christmas decorations. I will have a notebook close by, so I can jot down all the “trouble spots”, all the events of the day that could use a bit of strategy and thinking. There will be lots of them, and most of them will apply to some area where I am weak or careless, but I’ll look at it as a good thing. I’ll also write down or at least celebrate the good things about the bottom line, like the fact that my 4 year old is nestling close to me and saying, “Can I have some toast? I LOVE you—”
