Tip: When you catch yourself going into that depressing headspace of feeling overwhelmed about all the renovating jobs you have to do, pause and change the narrative  to;

Look at what we have already done, make a mental note of every single little thing you have done until you start to feel better, more positive and have things in better perspective again.

Here is an example.

Sunday night, that time of the weekend when my mind wanders and I am reflecting on what we have achieved renovation wise since Michael got home Friday afternoon. Last night (Sunday night 8.20pm) I was feeling pretty blah about not a lot of big things getting done like we had planned and I was feeling pretty blah about my injury restricting me and not being able to contribute like I used to. But I caught myself before going too far down that slippery slope of feeling overwhelmed and nothing is getting done head space. You know that feeling where you feel like everything is on top of you and it feels like you are walking through treacle?! Seriously, it doesn’t even make sense does it?! After all we are all doing the best on any given day.

What did I do?

I literally said to myself you are about to make a choice about the way you are thinking, which way do you want to go.

a) Further down the not good enough, nothing is finished enough, too much to do, not enough time, not enough money, doom and gloom

or

b) Keep things in perspective. Look around and purposely make a mental list of every single thing that we have achieved since we have been here until I got myself out of the overwhelm feeling. Then I  told Michael how I was feeling and asked if we could talk for 10 minutes about his ideas for the door replacement before we watched our movie. We capped the talk at 10 minutes, gave each other a hug, said how much we appreciated each other and how we knew things always start to feel overwhelming in the middle of a project then snuggled in for our Sunday night movie.

The night could have looked a whole lot different if I had chosen a).

So what did we actually do on the weekend? We had quality family time, cleaned the guinea pig hutches, added extra hay to Honeybees area and cleaned the big Hen House, nursed a sick hen, spent time visiting a friend, Michael and Lil played several games of chess when they had Liliana and Papa time, and Michael helped Lil with a project she is working on most of Saturday morning, we ate beautiful meals all cooked from scratch with lots of food harvested from our own garden, we made Plum Chutney, cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom, did extra laundry, Ebb the Spoodle had a bath, we researched some renovation things, talked through our renovation budget and reassessed time frames for things, talked about school plans, work plans, looked at what the next couple of months holds for us, we did some weeding, watered the Kitchen Garden twice, and spent Sunday morning doing some meal prep for the week. Michael sent off work related emails and texts, Lil did some research for her University studies, I worked on a few ideas and edited some photos. Lil and I meditated in the garden and we all sat outside at different times in between jobs and enjoyed the garden. Hardly a waste of a weekend. Oh the stories we tell ourselves about not being good enough.

Take precious care,

Jude x