Mom

My mom is the best person I know.

She's the kind of person you end up spilling out your life story to.  Even if she is just your customer in the checkout lane (true story).  She is the quintessential mom, the one all our friends always called mom, the one who is always there whenever anyone needs her. 

I wrote recently about the fact that I have very little memory from my childhood.  Therefore I rely on my parents and my sister to fill in the blanks.  Most of my early memories are not actually memories of the event but instead memories based on repeated tellings of the story.  One of my favorites is from a time when I was almost three.  Cher was on the cover of Time magazine.  All I saw when I looked at the cover was my beautiful, olive skinned, long black haired mom, and I asked her, "Mommy, why is a picture of you on this magazine?"  There truly was a remarkable resemblance way back then, but the main reason my mom loves that story so much is the fact that she was seven hundred months (give or take) pregnant with my sister at the time.

My mom still has what used to be her signature long black hair.  Of course, now she must dye it to cover what would be a full head of white hair, and she wears it in a loose bun instead of flowing down her back.  And she no longer is the size that Cher was on that magazine cover.  My mom has a history of severe back problems due to Degenerative Disk Disease which have caused multiple herniated disks.  She also has weak connective tissue, which basically means that her insides keep slipping, causing hernias and prolapses of all shapes and sizes.  I honestly could not tell you how many surgeries she has endured over the years, all with their promises to fix whatever was wrong, all with their long recuperation periods.  We often joke that the surgeons should just put in a zipper to make it easier the next time around.  Ultimately nothing has ever truly stayed fixed.

What all that means is that my mom endures constant pain all day, every day.  She takes prescribed anti-inflammatories and pain medication, and often even that is not enough.  The debilitating back pain is one of the main contributors to the fact that she is now obese, and the fact that she is obese is now one of the main contributors to the back and leg pain.  It's a terrible Catch-22, and it is one of the main reasons I am so dedicated to losing the weight I have to lose.

My mom now walks with a cane and doesn't leave the house too much.  I wish I could change that.  We both joined a local gym that has an indoor pool, and she loved walking laps and wanted me to push her to go, but now when I call she tells me that she is in too much pain, or she has a bad cold.  I wish I knew how to help.

My mom is an amazing person.  I could write for days about her, but my timer has beeped, signaling the end of my writing time.  After venting how overwhelmed I am feeling with life in general, I decided to rely on my FLYlady teachings and use my timer today to keep me from getting so wrapped up in one task I end up ignoring the rest.  And since I have already given myself "just five more minutes" three times now, I really should move on to the next part of my list.  So I guess I'll end this the way I began, by simply stating the most important thing I could tell you about her:

My mom is the best person I know.



This was one of the writing prompts from NaBloPoMo.  I promised myself that I would write a post every day for the entire month.  I tried it before and only made it one day.  Let's see if I can do better this time!

Prioritizing

Ever make a Wordle before?  It's a great website where you can just type in a bunch of words (or cut and paste text from another source) and it creates these word art pictures.  I've used it while teaching before but never for myself, but today just felt like a good day to start.  I'm overwhelmed with all that I need to do and having an incredibly difficult time prioritizing.

If I lived in a vacuum (or was able to locate life's remote control so I could just hit <PAUSE> for a little bit) I would devote all my time to finishing the @#$% coursework I need to finish in order to reactivate my teaching certificate.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a moment and read all about it.  Right now.  No, I'm serious.  I'll wait.









All done?

Good!

Okay, so now you know I still need to complete eighty continuing education hours in order to be able to teach and/or substitute in a public school once again.  And in case you're curious, this is directly from the PA Department of Education Website:

 

What must educators do to remain in compliance with Act 48?

Educators must maintain their certificates as active

by earning six collegiate credits

or six PDE-approved in-service credits

or 180 continuing education hours

or any combination of the above every five calendar years. 

NOTE: Each collegiate credit is equal to 30 continuing education hours.

I guess the good news is that I have already completed one hundred CEUs (Continuing Education Units or Hours) and am one third of the way through a course worth thirty CEUs.  Plus the courses I have found are free, on-line, and self-paced, so I can squeeze them in whenever I can.  The bad news is everything is so friggin' time consuming!

Which brings me back to the title of this post.  If I did live in a vacuum and could just hunker down and finish the remaining eighty CEUs in order to reactivate my teaching certification, I would be able to substitute a couple times a week, bringing in an extra six hundred plus a month, give or take, which would make an enormous difference in our lives right now.

HOWEVER . . . I don't live in a vacuum, and even though I know completing the coursework to reactivate my certification would solve so many of our problems, I have to continue dealing with every other aspect of our lives at the same time.  And there is a lot of other "stuff" to have to deal with.

And so it comes down to prioritizing, a task that apparently I suck at.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the basic concept.  I need to list everything I have to do and then determine what is the most important, then the second most important, and so on, and tackle the most important things on the list first, gradually moving down the list.  And in theory, that works and sounds pretty simple. 


But in reality life has all kinds of lists, and there are high priority items on all of them.  So how do you determine which items need to be dealt with now and which ones can be put off until later? Or should I really just be looking into figuring out a way to combine all my lists together and somehow prioritize all the different tasks on that master list?


Just so I'm clear, here are my various life To Do lists:

1. Reactivate my teaching certificate
2. Maintain "order" in the house by cleaning on a regular basis and decluttering/organizing the crap that seems to overflow from every room in our house
3. Figure out to feed everyone relatively healthy that everyone will eat and still stick to our extremely tight budget
4. Get out of debt while still paying all our other bills on time AND buying groceries so everyone can eat at least three times a day
5. Lose forty pounds
6. Make sure each of the three kids' academic and social-emotional needs are being met both at home and at school, both during the school year AND during the summer
7. Teach at my part-time position

I could literally spend all day simply working on one or two tasks on ANY of these lists.  And notice I did not include anything about developing and/or maintaining any personal relationships, even though this is an area of my life that is severely lacking. 

The problem is clearly that each of those seven To Do lists is vitally important and none of them can be ignored.  And when I spend time focusing on any one of them, I neglect the rest, resulting in total disaster.  I am sure there is a way to maintain balance and figure out a way to accomplish it all, but I simply do not see it.  So what do I do?

My favorite way to escape my life


Clearly I have too much on my plate.  If a friend was telling me all this, I would tell them they were trying to do too much and to give themselves a break.  And while I understand that, it doesn't really seem an option.

I mean, let's say I focus primarily on reactivating my certification.  As things stand right now, we are just squeaking by living paycheck to paycheck.  Our credit cards are pretty much maxed out, both of our credit scores totally suck, our debt is monumental, and we have gone through any emergency savings we ever amassed.  I need to continually seek out ways to save money, get financial assistance, and/or bring in more money.  And I cannot do that if I am only working on completing my online courses!

And let's say I focus on figuring out ways to make sure we CAN pay all our bills each month with a little extra towards paying down our debt?  Then I don't have enough time to keep up with all the work that has to be done around the house and things get out-of-control pretty quickly.

So let's say I focus on maintaining the house AND making sure we still have enough money to keep the lights on?  Then making sure all three kids' needs are being met at school and at home goes out the window.  We are still struggling to find the right medication to treat Twin A's ADHD to help him focus in class and not do things like, I don't know, getting up in the middle of direct instruction to initiate a conversation with another student.  And he still is having many, many, many meltdowns both at school and at home about any little thing - it is pretty hard to anticipate what will set him off.  And I also have two other kids who have their own struggles and problems!

To say I'm overwhelmed is an understatement.

To say I need a friggin' break doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.


And what do I end up doing for a good portion of the day today? 

Do I clean?

Cook?

Figure out a grocery list that will take advantage of the store sales and my coupons?

Work on my courses?

Work on my budget once again?

Spend another day doing research into various options for the kids to do this summer?



NO.





I choose to blog about it all instead.


Sigh.

Making Up for my Neglect

I have neglected you, oh blog of mine, and I'm sorry. 

Life got crazy (what else is new?) and I stopped checking in.

Bad writer, bad!

To make up for it, I have started a brand new blog all about my journey this year to lose the weight and lose the debt:  Losing It.  I know, I know, the title is not that exciting or original, but it's kind of funny considering I'm trying to do this without "losing it" if you know what I mean.

So go, check it out.  Right now.  And leave me a comment or two.  I need the motivation. 

And trust me, I know the new blog in no way makes up for the past six weeks of neglect.  I will try to do that with a brand new non-weight loss related post by the end of the day.  Promise.

Ha, Ha, Ha

Oy.

Man plans, God laughs.  This really has been my motto for a while now, and I just have to remember it.

*  I committed to participate in NaBloPoMo - writing a new post every single day for the entire month.  I was actually pretty excited about this idea, both to give me a good incentive to push myself with my writing and because potentially it was a good way to increase my blog's audience from the hundreds two of you who are reading it right now to maybe thousands five or more.

And then God laughed, and my computer got some horrible virus that even the Tech Guys at Staples called a "Bad Virus."  To remove the virus and install better virus protection will come to almost the same amount I paid for the laptop a number of years ago, so it really didn't seem financially responsible.  I am, however, paying around $70 for them to hopefully save my files and pictures that I saved on the computer.  Bottom line, I was without a computer for just about two full days.  Oh well, I'll try NaBloPoMo again next month.

*  I have been recovering from this stupid pneumonia for a while now - almost four weeks.  I have been doing everything I am supposed to do: took every single one of my antibiotics (even the long blue one that always began disolving on my tongue causing me to gag no matter how I tried to swallow it), rested for the length of time the doctors said I should and then some, stayed out of work for the length of time the doctors said I should.  I was given permission to ease back into the gym starting this past Monday, as long as I reduced the intensity level and time of my workouts.

And then God laughed.  I tried a Yoga class on Wednesday figuring this would be a good thing - deep breathing, slow movements.  Yeah, right.  Right from the start I discovered I needed to modify almost every movement to make it easier for me.  Okay, I could do that.  But after about fifteen minutes, my chest started hurting.  Not because of my heart (though I did picture having to call 911 to be driven to the ER so they could hook me up to all those machines and make sure I wasn't having a heart attack) but because of my lungs.  I stopped, put my shoes back, and left.

*  I went grocery shopping yesterday, after taking a lot of time the night before to match up all my coupons to what was on sale, my mini-attempt at extreme couponing.

And then God laughed and made sure I realized by the huge wave of fatigue that hit me while in the checkout line that I was not ready to do grocery shopping yet.

I think I need to stop making my plans public because I have so much I need to do.  I'm going to attempt to do it all (paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, and replan for a birthday party I'm performing at tomorrow since I had saved the hours of planning I already had completed on my old computer) while sitting on my couch today in order to rest my lungs some more.

If the couch breaks, then I know God just has a sick sense of humor.   

NaBloPoMo

I have decided to accept the NaBloPoMo challenge to write one post every single day.  It starts on Tuesday.  I figure if I blog about the fact that I am going to be participating in NaBloPoMo it will hopefully ensure that I actually complete the challenge.

New Look

Well, what do you think?  I've been searching for free Blogger templates and found a bunch that I liked.  I tried a few that didn't seem to work, but I think I really like this one.  The only problem is I can't figure out how to fix the "undefined" parts on the left.  I'm hoping if I take the time to fool around with it some more I'll find the answer, but I have already worked on this longer than I planned and only have thirty minutes left before I have to leave Starbucks in order to be home when the kids get there.  So, it'll do, for now.  If anyone is reading this (IS anyone reading this?) and knows how to make adjustments, please leave a comment and let me know!

Edited to add:  Oh, forget it!  I went back to the original template.