I have been sitting at my keyboard for the last hour trying to figure out what I was going to write about this week. I have been out of the loop on any events outside of my little family, so I have no current event things brewing. No new tattoos lately to get myself riled up (if you remember one of my previous posts), and thankfully no LODD/injuries. I’ve been ignoring the news and social media, (for the most part, I am aware of what is happening in Afghanistan because I have family members and friends deployed right now.) so, it’s been a nice break to just enjoy my family. Focus on our family’s core value which is quality time.
Here we go I found it! Knew it was in there somewhere, ha! Do you guys have a value list in your family? If you don’t, I highly recommend it! It’s something I implemented rather recently in the last probably 4 months or so. My husband and I wrote down what we want out of our lives singly, and our time together, what is important to us and our kids. I got the list from my life coach and was able to pick out what my top values are as my own person. Then, I did the same assessment with my husband, and lo and behold most of them were spot on the same. It’s easy to just get into the day-to-day life spins. I know. We were there. I mean I don’t have a life coach for no reason! I need that person to push me to be a better version of myself. I want to live a meaningful life that is rich and fulfilled.
So, once we compiled this list of values, we started brainstorming about how we can actually implement our values into our day to day life. One small step at a time, right? Our first value we established is Family. That is our number one priority always, no matter what. What does that mean to us though?
It looks like: giving in to our kids begging to stay up past bedtime to watch a movie and have popcorn. It’s ignoring the dishes in the sink and both parents giving the bath because those giggles and splashes in the tub are contagious. It’s taking a random weekday off work, kids at daycare, date day with my husband. Once we started making these small changes our lives have been richer, we’ve laughed more, worried about the messes less, and just enjoyed our times together.
Our second one was our own well-being. This is all facets of our self. Our physical self, emotional, spiritual, mental. If we are not whole ourselves, we cannot be whole for those that need us. Being whole for me means having alone time and feeling healthy. As a mom, and someone who solo parents a lot, alone time is far and few in between and being healthy would take a back burner most of the time. So instead of hitting that snooze every morning, I wake up, stretch, exercise, make coffee and have a shower before the house wakes up. I never realized how much I needed this time. I also didn’t really realize how much of a bear I was in the mornings. It was bad. Admitting the behavior is the first step, right? My husband’s are mental and emotional health. To him that’s mowing the grass, fishing, being outside putting around in the garage.
Before we wrote these things down, I would get so annoyed of his putting around; he was being “unproductive” in my eyes. Yikes, typing that out sounds terrible doesn’t it! It was his downtime to just be on auto pilot mode. He has to be hyper-vigilant 12 hours a day for days on end. So of course he likes to just come home and do mindless tasks while listening to music or podcasts! I no longer get annoyed when I come home and the dishes are still in the sink (from us skipping them the night before) and he was home all day. I should add, our house “duties” are split pretty equally; he does the laundry and vacuums an obsessive amount; I don’t remember the last time I dusted but I do usually clean up the kitchen.
Awareness. That’s all it is. Awareness that our values are the same, but the way we handle them can be entirely different. That’s ok though! We aren’t the same exact person, that’d be weird. I love his obsessive vacuuming because that means I don’t have to. I love that he putts around the garage and organizes it for the 300th time since we moved to our house 4 years ago because then I can house my car there! I know that he thinks waking up at 5AM is insane and eating salads for lunch sounds awful. We are our own people, but with our family values highlighted, we can live a rich and meaningful life together and enjoy almost every minute; and in this crazy LEOW life, every minute counts!
l Danielle l