These are the Days

Okay, I promise, no fake pooping or pretend cooking shows with weird voices today. But thanks for your comments and support on my last post.  It would really be an honor and joy to get the opportunity to run with the Nuun team for Hood to Coast 2012!  

Instead of shooting vlogs and odd videos to share, I'm just going to share a bit from my journal on this beautiful Friday morning.  Thankful for the time I had to drink my coffee and have journal time with my kiddos (they have their own journal but they also helped with mine today).  Love my Fridays this year! 

"  3/23/12....Slowing myself down just a bit on this Friday morning in March.  Knowing that these days are numbered.  My time at home with my two younger kids without anywhere to go and everywhere a POSSIBILITY is precious!  I love my Fridays with my sweet kids.  The promise of family movie night, pizza and ice cream, and a Saturday morning to wake up late is just one of the many things that keeps me smiling today.  And an easier day of Boston training today after an incredibly awesome peak week!  Reminders everywhere that LIFE is RICH...a gift to savor.  Even the toys scattered on the floor and the spilled cereal and milk on the table next to a pile of stinky clothes waiting to be washed are a reminder of this wonderful life to be lived.  THANKFUL!  A few highlights of gratitude today:

• Journal time with my sweet girl.
• Awesome week of training.  6x1ks were SOLID
• New possibilities with life, running, motherhood
• Family Night tonight
• Some very special running girlfriends (and non running girlfriends) that Encourage and LOVE me.  
• Healthy kids
• Reminders to be in the Present before I miss out.  So easy to get sucked into the "EVERYWHERE ELSE".  
• Opportunities to use my gifts
• Ever loving husband and love of my life.  
• Boston Marathon so close!  A bit sad about one of my dearest friends who won't be there due to injury.  She's provided so much love, strength and encouragement to me over the last couple years.  I love her dearly and I've finally just accepted that she will be with me in spirit and heart.  So much of my 26.2 in Boston will be run for and "with" her in my mind.  I love you Jenn."  (Still thinking of bringing you in blow up form just for kicks and good blog opportunities).  
• 22 miles with Nicole on Sunday!  Last really long run before Boston!  So nice to have a compatible running partner for these runs.  

Thanks for letting me share my life with you.  Thankful for you.  And great to meet some of you last night at the book reading for Train Like a Mother.  Always nice to put faces with names.  However, a little odd meeting people that seem to know everything about me (fake poops, skin stretching, motherhood stories, training, etc.) when I know very little about them.  Ha!  Felt a little naked last night.  

Happy Friday!  We are off to the Children's Museum to slurp up some sick germs.  Isn't that what ends up happening at places like that??!  Let's hope NOT! What makes your Friday special?  Any fun weekend plans?  

Amanda

Habits for Happiness and Fulfillment

I woke up earlier than usual this morning.  The birds are singing, the house is quiet with sleeping kids, my coffee is hot, and life feels full of possibility.  Every so often I get this feeling like something big is right around the corner in my life.  Something important and exciting.  Something that is ready for me when I'm ready for it.  The next step.  The next opportunity or puzzle piece to this joyful life!  Whatever it is, I feel like something positive and enriching is coming and I'm open arms and ready.  And I'm excited for the next step while still being present and fully happy with my life now.

Recently, I've been reflecting on the key components to living a happy and successful life.  Happiness and success are different for everyone and I truly think that a huge part of experiencing it comes from our perspective and attitude.  So much of feeling "rich in life" comes from what we do with what we have.  I'm always inspired by the people in my life that continue to dream big and see the many blessings and gifts in life despite their financial status, house they live in, job they have, etc.  Those naturally optimistic and joyful people that keep on keepin' on towards their dreams and goals!  The people that inspire me to use my gifts and what I have to make a wonderful life despite the things I lack.

I have to say that I feel pretty darn happy with my life right now.  I have not always felt so joyful and peaceful.  In fact, growing up and all through college, I was one big ball of fear, stress, and worry.  I'm so glad that chapter in my life is finished!  This morning I jotted down a list of things that I thought were key to being happy and living a personally successful and fulfilled life.  A life of joy, challenge, and satisfaction. I've really tried to be conscious about making these things "habits" in my daily living and over time they have become routine and natural components in my life.  Here are some of my "habits":

Habits for Living a Happy and Fulfilled Life

Focus on Gratitude
This is huge for me!  I have lists everywhere filled with things I'm thankful for.  These lists of gratitude include all kinds of things from the breakfast I ate this morning to the lessons I learned from my injury last summer.  So much to be thankful for and I truly believe that when we focus on gratitude and recognizing the things we have to be thankful for, then we end up getting more of the good stuff in our life...the stuff to be thankful for!

Love Fully 
I'm not perfect at loving others...who is?  But I try to live a life where I show love and compassion to the people around me.  I'm human and I do fall into traps of getting irritated with others and finding myself wanting to "vent" about someone but one of my big goals is to challenge myself with "How I can love others, especially the people that are hardest for me to love?"

Use Your Gifts to Give to Others
There are always ways to give of ourselves. The cool thing is that we each have unique gifts and it doesn't always take a lot of work or resources to use our gifts to help others or to make our community and world a better place.  I find that sometimes just giving my "words" or "thoughts" to someone and telling them something they might need to hear is a way to give (and love).

Faith in Something Outside Our Own Power
 Having faith in a higher power and being able to find refuge and strength in prayer and spiritual connection is such a comfort to me.  My faith gives me peace and a feeling of being safe and protected.  It also helps me trust and get through things that I can't understand.

Live without Fear and Doubt
Fear is deadly.  It will suck the happiness right out of life and serve as one big road block to keep you from where you want to be.  Fear is perhaps one of our biggest enemies to reaching our goals.  It has taken years for me to be able to dismiss the fear that starts to creep up and get in the way from believing in my dreams.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of not being good enough.  Fear of failing.  Fear of losing what we have and taking risks. Fear of people not taking us seriously or thinking we are stupid for our ideas.  I lived with fear for Way. Too. Long and I'm thankful to finally be keeping it at bay.   This has been KEY to making some of my dreams become reality

Focus on What is Right
We can all make a long list of our flaws, the things we should have done different, and the ways we screwed up big time!  Although it is good to have a healthy dose of humility and know our flaws and areas of weakness so that we can get better, it is dangerous to get stuck in dwelling and obsessing over the things we messed up on.  It is so easy to get in that rut of being mad at ourselves for things we did that now appear to be all wrong!  Instead, I try to focus on what is working for me now.  What am I doing right?  What steps am I taking to pull myself up and move on?

Take Something to Learn From and Move On
Use those "mess ups" and lows in life as a learning experience.  Take the lesson that has been provided for you and move on with new tools for living!  A gift in disguise to make us wise (that just sounds good when you say it).

Trust in What You Know
Believe in your own wisdom!  Trust that you have lessons to teach and advice to give yourself.  So easy to second guess ourselves and think we always need the approval or advice from others.  Sometime we just have to believe in what we already know!

Set Goals
I've mentioned goals a lot in this blog!  Such a necessary part of my life in making it better and moving closer to my dreams.  The cool thing about goals is that they don't have to stay the same.  They are like steps to a ladder to get us to where we want to go.  We might sit with a goal for awhile and then move on without reaching it.  Sometimes having a goal and living with it for awhile is just an avenue for reaching a new place in our life where we can then reevaluate and change our goal to fit us better as we grow.  I'm big on having longterm, short term, big and small goals!  Go for it...set some goals!

Celebrate The Little Things
Part of having goals in life is to accomplish new things.  When we do find ourselves meeting our goals, it is important to celebrate our success!  Even the small things are worth celebrating!  Celebrate you because you should should be your own biggest fan.  I'm constantly telling myself "Good Job" and finding ways to celebrate throughout the days.

Take in the World Around You

This is the hardest for me!  To work on slowing down enough to be fully present in my life and the world around me.  I struggle with just turning my mind down and really listening, noticing, and being in the Now.

Believe You're Already There
My mom always reminds me to "Tell your story the way you want it to be".  For a long time I didn't really know what she meant by this and I just humored her with yeah yeah.  But I'm realizing more and more just how helpful it is for me to really believe in my importance and see myself already doing the things that I want to do...become a professional writer, dream big with running, be the best mother I can be, and find ways to use my gifts as a teacher.  We are all people and sometimes the only thing that separates the doers from the "maybe some dayers" is the belief that something is really possible and already going to happen.

What are some of your habits of living?

Amanda

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Assumptions About the SAHM, Balance, and Making the Most of Our Lots In Life

It is one of those rare moments that I wake up earlier than the kids and I have a few stolen minutes to myself before I'm needed by three little ones and my time is a wooosh of putting out fights, wiping up messes, answering what seems like thirty people at once, wagging my finger with a growl on my face as I try to talk to someone important on the phone and keep my kids at bay, giving kisses, playing little people, racing cars, pretending to be a princess, always making more snacks, getting drinks, cleaning up paint, crawling around like a horse, trying to get three kids focused, dressed, and ready for school, gymnastics, or doctor appointments and an endless list of other things that make me happy.  I also have those breaks where I get to steal away for a few minutes at a time to check my e-mail, read a snip of something funny or enriching...you know, connect with other ADULTS...even if it is on the computer and not the once visited staff room or teacher meeting after school.  Sometimes I even have a moment to make a phone call to a friend...preferably a friend with kids so that they understand the sound of seeming chaos in the background.  I love my life.  I love that I chose to make my present career to be at home with my kids.  I'm putting my Masters Degree to good use I'd say.  And what I love most is that I CAN do this.  I know it isn't something that everyone wants or can do but I'm thankful for it and I'm treating it like anything in my life and making the most of it!  I know that I'll have years ahead of me to go back to school.  Get that Doctorate and teach at a University if I want.  Write my book.  Go back to teaching. You know, become the President or marry a prince.  But for now, I am here.  I'm a Mom.  Day in and day out.  And I love it.  But that doesn't mean it is a cake walk.  It doesn't mean that I'm just kicking up my feet all day and eating cheese sticks and watching Dora eat cocoa beans off the trees in the rain forest and telling Swiper to Stop Swiping!  

I guess one of the things that I've been ULTRA sensitive to lately is the small comments or conversations I hear about how nice it must be to Stay At Home and Not Work!  Not just the comments that mention how lucky I am or how wonderful it must be because it IS wonderful and do consider myself lucky and these are such good intended comments.   I've received so much love and good support about my decision to be home with my kids.  My close friends and family know how important my teaching career was to me and they know how passionate and in love with learning and being active in the education field is to me.  It is my good friends and family that know that it was NOT an easy decision to give up something that made me SO INCREDIBLY Happy and ALIVE! The comments or suggestions that seem to be getting under my skin lately are the ones that make the job as a SAHM seem "cute" or "small" or ....wait for it....."EASY".

I mean really, doesn't SAHM mean:
*  staying in your jammies all day 
*  Every day is like a weekend or day off (um, not when you do it every day!)
*  drinking coffee and reading blogs (um, coffee, yes!  Necessary!  Blogs, only on the fly and with little kids tugging at my leg and blocks flying overhead.)
*  Going to thy gym and dropping kids off a daycare (what?!  Not yet...Jillian on the living room floor maybe.  But with a kid or two on my back and under my stomach when I'm doing push ups).
*  Letting my kids watch t.v all day while I read or talk to friends.  (um, again no.  Don't get me wrong, I have my uses for t.v but it usually waits until quiet time in the afternoon and some days they don't get any.  I'm kind of hardcore about the screen time.)
*  Sit on Facebook and e-mail and write blogs all day!  Surely this must be what you SAHM do all day because when we working people get home from work, we see so many postings from you on FB.  (yeah.  Well, you have a staff room and adults to engage with people!  Thank GOD for social networks or I think I'd lose my friggin' mind!  And Yes, I do take a moment here and there for e-mail, blogs, and facebook...it keeps me sane.  Helps me stay connected and involved and for Goodness Sake, I get to use my MIND!!  But as always, I have goals in life, and one of them is to spend way less time getting sucked into the computer)   
*  You get the gist....we basically sing songs, play with play dough, eat snacks, and have one big long vacation (okay, so the majority of you don't think this but there are a few that do)

I think we all can find things with our life and our jobs that are hard.  Things that make us feel over the top with stress.  We can all feel out of control and lost sometimes.  But it is so important to not get trapped in that "Grass is Always Greener" mindset.  Life is about finding Balance.

Life as a SAHM is about Balance (as with any job) and putting intention and focus into being with my kids, creating a magical childhood for them, making my living/working environment work for me (this means trying to keep it clean and organized...I mean, I'm here a lot!),  and making sure I take time to nurture and support MYSELF!  Right now this means setting and accomplishing personal goals, connecting socially and intellectually with other adults, and continuing to reflect, write, read and set goals for my personal life and career life after motherhood.  Part of this for me is writing my blog, staying connected with friends and family on facebook and e-mail and taking time to get away.  This is the public side that people see and perhaps why some people assume that being a SAHM is so easy and why we SAHMs can't possibly understand how difficult it is to work outside the home and still juggle family life, etc.

I guess my purpose in writing this is just to touch on the issue of accepting our lots in life, our jobs, our situations and making the most of them without assuming that we have it better or harder than others.  It isn't about what job is better or harder to balance or who has more on their plate.  I mean really, it is about balancing the life we do have and making the most out of our situations.  We all have busy lives and bumps to work through.

Wooooo weeee, looks like I had something to get off my chest (as little as my chest is, it sure did have a lot there)!    Thankful that I have this blog to vent!

Things I'm thankful for today:
*  I had a graston technique therapy session with my Sports Chiropractor yesterday and am feeling better.  Thinking that my problems had a lot to do with the Kinvara Shoes that I was trying to run in.  I over pronate so I'm thinking I'm good to stick with some more supportive shoes. Still taking it easy on the running front...this is important to me...I don't want to be stupid.
*  My purchases from Portland Running Company ( next blog)
*  My kids sleeping in late so that i had time to write and reflect.
*  It's Friday
*  I love my job!
*  I've got a beach house all picked out for my marathon weekend and will get to stay 3 nights with some of our best friends!

*  Most importantly, today I'm thankful for supportive and understanding people that make the most of their life and support and encourage others.

I'll leave you with a picture of my office at work.

1.  If you made it this far through this blog you either A.  Are one of those few people that really read it all  or B. Scrolled down to see what questions I might ask in hopes that they are easy to answer without being obvious that you didn't read the blog.  Ha, I get this!


2.  Balance.  What's an area of your life that you would like to give more attention to in order to live a more balanced life?  


3.  When you start feeling out of control with your life, what are things you do to find balance and peace?  


Happy Friday!  I'll be back next time with a shorter and more interesting post...I promise!  Probably about Running Shoes and Bras...Exciting!
Amanda