Sunday, September 18, 2011

Weekend

Life is just really really good right now. Better than it has been in a while, actually. I was just thinking today how much things have changed in the past month. I've gone from feeling constantly stressed and frazzled to being able to relax and enjoying life so much more. I think therapy and my six months to a better me project is working. :)

It's been a really fun week around here. I discovered the awesome music and movement class at the library, I had a really fun lunch with friends, Shawn and I finally got to see The Help on Friday evening (loved it!!) and yesterday we went on a family nature walk that I really enjoyed and I got my camera out for the first time in a while.

I've been looking forward to fall. I love this time of the year so much. I love that the leaves are starting to change, I love that the weather is cooling off and I'm looking forward to pumpkin patches, corn mazes, apple cider and Halloween activities. October is one of my favorite months of the year. I'm hoping for more nature walks, lots more pictures and some other fun events coming up.

This week we're having some friends over for a season premier party for The Middle, which is one of my very favorite shows. Now that The Office is crappy I had to find some new shows to be addicted to! I'm looking forward to parking myself in front of the TV a few nights this week for all the season premiers.

For now I'm off to get the kids in bed, but I will leave you with a few cute pictures that I took of Clarissa yesterday. It's still next to impossible to get her to sit still for pictures, but I tried. I love that kid!


Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Therapy, week 5

Therapy was great today, I'm really glad that I decided to do this for myself. The anxiety is way better and I feel like I'm coming out of the funk I've been in lately. I'm less stressed out, I'm happier and I've worked through some crap that I should have resolved long ago. I've also been able to get off the medication that had crappy side effects, which is what prompted me to do this in the first place. It's all good.

Today Clarissa and I went to a music and movement class at the library and it was awesome! I've been to several toddler classes at local libraries over the years and some of them are great and some of them are not so great. This one was fantastic! It's a newer library in a really pretty area and half of the class was indoors and half was outdoors. After they did their standard dancing around to silly music indoors we went outside and played with one of those big colorful parachutes. The kids shook it around, ran under it and had a ball. After that the woman who runs the class sat all the kids in shade, got out her guitar and they all sang together. Clarissa absolutely loved it and I had a really good time too. It was nice to get out for a bit and do something fun. Clarissa has finally reached the age where it's fun to take her places and we're really having a good time together. One great thing about my kids being spaced far apart in age is that I've gotten this toddler one on one time with all three of them. I like this age when we can do things together during the day.

She's so funny, every morning we drive Matthew to the bus stop (because his bus stop is in a ridiculous location. Don't get me started.) and as soon as Matthew gets his backpack on and gets ready to leave, Clarissa runs and gets the little pink backpack that she got from her foster mother in Korea and puts it on. She wears it in the car while we get Matthew to the bus stop and then we come home and she takes it off and puts it away until the next day. She adores her big brothers and always tries to do whatever they're doing.

The school year is going great for the boys so far. Josh seems to be enjoying middle school and Matthew is loving third grade. I'm proud of my boys. They're really good kids.

This weekend I'm looking forward to having a little date night with Shawn. He finished reading The Help and we're going to see the movie. It's been a while since we've been to a movie without kids so I'm looking forward to it! Yay for date night! :)

Monday, September 12, 2011

Happy Chuseok!

We like to celebrate Korean holiday for Clarissa and today is one of the biggest Korean holiday of the year. It's Chuseok! Chuseok is kind of the Korean equivalent of American Thanksgiving. Families get together, eat lots of yummy food and the celebration goes on for a few days. It's early this year, some years it's not until October. For anyone who was around when we were grtting ready to travel to Korea to get Clarissa, it was the holiday that delayed our trip a few days because we didn't want to travel during the celebration. I was hoping to maybe have a big party and invite friends over for Korean food but the day kind of snuck up on me and I didn't have time to pull it together, so I just made bulgogi for our family. I taught Clarissa to say Happy Chuseok and it's sounds super cute. Shawn just took her to pick the boys up from taekwondo and I told her to be sure to say it to the Korean owner who is so cute with Clarissa. We'll see if she remembers. So it occurred to me recently that we're coming on the second anniversary of Clarissa joining our family! That really blows my mind. We brought her home on October 15, 2009. This October 15th she'll be celebrating by being the flower girl in the wedding of some good friends of ours! The groom is Korean and he and he fiancé are so sweet to Clarissa. They already picked out her flower girl dress and it's super cute! I just hope she's going to cooperate when it comes time to send her down the aisle! Two year olds can be pretty unpredictable. :) In other news, I read The Help the other day (I was feeling like the only person in the world who hadn't read it) and I LOVED it! If you haven't read it i highly recommend it.Shawn is reading it now and we're going to see it at the theater when he's done. Yay for date night! :) It sounds like Shawn is home with the kids so I'm off to here how taekwondo went!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Happy

It's past my bedtime and I really ought to go to sleep, but I haven't blogged in a while and thought I'd try to get a post in really quick.

Things are going really great here these days. Therapy has been really helpful and I'm making some positive changes that I'm happy about. I look forward to going each week. My therapist is really nice and we've had some good talks. My anxiety is noticibly better. The techniques he's given me have helped. I've been working on some self reflexion lately, trying to get back to who I am and what I want in life and refocusing myself on getting where I want to go. I'm reexamining the past, working through some things, letting some things go and that has been helpful.

Yesterday I got my journals out from high school and read through them. It was funny to read some of the things I wrote. Some things I had completely forgotten about and I revisted some things that are still very fresh in my mind. Some parts made me laugh and others reopened up some old wounds a bit. It was good though. It was nice to remember who I was at 17, so hopeful and excited about the future. I had big plans back then. Some panned out and some did not but I think I've basically gone in the direction I thought I would. It was interesting reading through that journal, knowing what I know now. It was interesting to read about my 17 year old self working through problems and making decisions when now I know what the outcome of those decisions would be. There were a few parts where I just wanted to smack my 17 year old self upside the head.

I've been working in therapy on goal setting. My therapist has me making lists and I'm really enjoying it. This type of therapy is only intended to be short term and I'll miss it when it's over.

In other news, the boys are settling into school and I've started mommy preschool with Clarissa. I love that she's getting old enough now to do things like that with. I have a lot of fun with her during the day while the boys are gone.

Ok, so now I really am going to bed. Tomorrow is a new day!

Friday, September 2, 2011

Gratitude

On my quest to better myself I started a gratitude journal yesterday. A gratitude journal is just a notebook  (or an ipad app if you're permanently glued to your ipad like me) where you write down all the little things that you're grateful for each day. It's a nice way to help you focus on the all the good things in life. Sometimes I get so bogged down with life that I forget to stop an enjoy it. I think a gratitude journal will help me remember to enjoy it.

It's actually really helped me see the positive side of every situation. This morning I woke up with a horrible headache and instead of focusing on the headache I took a minute to write in my gratitude journal how grateful I am for Tylenol. I paid the bills yesterday and instead of grumbling because I hate paying the bills I wrote how grateful I am that we have the money to pay the bills. There was a time in our marriage where that wasn't so easy. Some other random entries in my gratitude journal over the past two days:

I'm grateful for the birds in my tree. Watching them makes me happy.
I'm grateful for Josh happily unloading the dishwasher without complaining.
I'm grateful for the phone call I received from a friend.
I'm grateful for Shawn for a million reasons.

One of my favorite books is The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. When I think about gratitude I think of Corrie Ten Boom because she was such a great example of being grateful no matter what your circumstances. If you've never read the book it's the true story of a Christian woman who was put in a concentration camp during WWII because she helped hide Jewish people in her house and how she relied on her faith in God to get through such a horrible experience. I've read that book a million times and I never get tired of it. There is one part where she talks about how they housed many women in a room with straw mattresses that were covered in fleas. It was a terrible situation where the woman were just covered in flea bites. But because of the fleas the guards didn't like to go back to that area and the women were able to secretly have Bible study without getting caught. She talked about how grateful she was for those fleas and that has always stuck with me. If she can be grateful for fleas in a concentration camp the rest of us have nothing to complain about!

So today I'm grateful for Corrie Ten Boom's example and I'm grateful for my gratitude journal because it's helping me remember to focus on the positive things in life. The more I write the more I realize how much I have to be grateful for.