Bounce and Sway – What to do when you have no energy!

by | Sep 19, 2017 | Movement, Parenting, Tips and Techniques

This is one of the first videos I ever did back in August of 2015.  But it is still something I do anytime my energy is low, even if I have to try and do it from a chair due to the broken ankle these days.

 

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

The Only Scheduling Tool I Use

by | Sep 12, 2017 | Parenting, Tips and Techniques

How do you find the time to do all the things you need to get done in a day?

Much less fit in any self care time?

Can it even be done?  Especially in this culture of busy?

Would you believe me if I told you it could be done, and that I manage it, most of the time even though I have four daughters 11 and below, I run three businesses, am married and have several hobbies?

Let’s go back almost 3 years ago.  We had just moved 30 minutes away from the area of Maine we first moved to four years ago, effectively leaving most of our support system, so that we could save about that much time in my husbands daily commute.  Our youngest had just turned a year old, and unlike some of her sisters had gone straight into the “must watch constantly because she might kill herself” mode that meant I was always on guard.

I was working on building a business, anything really to be able to help supplement my hubby’s income while being home with the girls.  I was trying out an MLM for the second time and having about as much luck as the time I had tried one 10 years previously.  The one thing I knew I needed was support.

Through making connections on Facebook (and following instructions from the MLM I was a part of) I found a business coach down the coast in Maine and I started chatting with her.  To make a long story short she was getting ready to have a free virtual week which I joined and then later became one of her clients.

The biggest tool I think I have learned from the amazing Britt Bolnick of In Arms Coaching is that of Sacred Structure.  And it is through the regular use of this tool that I have been able to obtain a fair amount of balance in my schedule for the must do’s, the want to do’s and fun stuff.

The only slight twist I have added to Britt’s amazing concept is that of Grace Time.  Every week there is at least one (if not two) blocks of time that are labeled grace for catching up on all the business or other tasks that didn’t happen at their assigned time.  Because you know, as a mum, it doesn’t always happen the way you thought it should!  That grace time has saved me on more than one week.

What I love about Sacred Structure is you can set it up over and over again, so that it is always reflecting what is most important in your life right now.  We all have different seasons in our life, and what might be the most important right now (for instance healing from this broken ankle) will not necessarily be such a priority in another future season.  Sacred Structure adjusts for this.

Sacred Structure has changed my world.  The first thing I started putting in it was crafting/creative time, and that is still something that needs to happen regularly for my happiness.  Strangely enough that creative time bleeds over and makes everything else I do, whether it is parenting, running my businesses or cooking dinner, easier to accomplish.

What would be the first thing you would add to your schedule that you can’t currently find time to do?  Tell me in the comments below.  And check out Britt’s free Sacred Structure guide right here.  She even has videos for it now!

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Teaching Patience

by | Aug 30, 2017 | Parenting

This week’s blog post is something that I recorded on my phone at 1:47 AM when I couldn’t sleep.  This is literally the transcription of my recording and my thoughts on teaching patience to our children.

Teaching patience in a digital age where everything can come in nanoseconds is such an interesting parental concept.

I grew up in that teeny tiny gap generation from 1977 to 1983.  Before the Millennials but after Generation X.  My childhood was analog but my teenage and college years were digital.  So I kind of bridge and understand both and yet, it is so important to me to teach my kids patience.

And yet I remember what it was like to be a small kid and be stuck in that idea that it NEEDS to happen RIGHT now. But when I was growing up things didn’t happen right now.  You had to wait one week to the next week for a tv show, you couldn’t binge watch a whole season in a day. My kids totally want to do that when a new season comes on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and I am like “No, no, save some for tomorrow, don’t binge watch it all in one day!”

It’s so funny when the Grand Tour came out on Amazon Prime (you know the car show, we usually watch Top Gear when everyone is sick, because it’s this innocuous slightly funny show, doesn’t harm anyone, no swearing, and it isn’t cooking.  Because I mean sometimes watching a cooking show when your tummy is upset, is a REALLY bad idea).  Anyway when the Grand Tour came out and Amazon would only release one episode a week and my kids were like “OMG, we have to wait a whole week for a new episode?”

These are lessons in patience.

Patience, I think this is one of the reasons why it is so important to get kids involved in gardening.  Besides that digging in dirt is a natural antidepressant, but just the fact that it doesn’t grow overnight.  I mean even my husband’s hops which can literally grow six inches in a day, still it’s a way to learn patience.

My almost 11 year old has gotten ducks and we recently got more ducks because we needed more girls, and we got a duckling.  My 11 year old kept being worried about the duckling, and we kept saying it’s only for a few weeks, in a few more weeks it is going to be a duck, this passage of time, and figuratively she’s had it for six weeks and it is now much more of a duck than a duckling, it doesn’t need to follow its mama anymore than when we first got it.

These lessons in patience.

So I broke my ankle hiking and it’s been a little bit more than 3 weeks since I broke it. (Note: I wasn’t doing anything crazy – this is a hiking trail I have been up at least a dozen times before and I am sure I will go up a dozen times again.) But I slipped on some rocks and broke my ankle. Ever since I broke my ankle, every single night, my 9 year old comes to say goodnight to me, because I am sleeping downstairs in a chair to elevate my ankle, and she says “I hope you feel better in the morning.  I hope your ankle is better in the morning.”

And I get it, I get that she wants everything to come back to normal.  It is never going to come back to normal that it was before, because that is just not how life works, everything changes.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think it is one of those things that you just have to experience.

But the other thing I want to say is it is not like pain is linear.  I mean we would like to think it is, that everyday we are healing we are going to get just a little bit better. But healing is like grief, it comes in waves, it cyclic or spiral or cylindrical.  You are going to have bad days, days when it hurts more or you can’t do it.  Where you’ve got to push more, or days when the grief just overwhelms you, but it’s going to happen.

It becomes part of you, part of your soul, just like grief does.  It can be 5, 10 years down the road and it can come up again, because it is part of who you are, you will be reminded if nothing else.

Teaching kids patience is like teaching kids about money these days because money doesn’t exist, it’s all invisible.

Teaching kids patience, trying to explain to my 5 year old and my 9 year old that their 11 year old sister is just going through her uglies, and that this is just a stage and she will get better and that right now she is just being a bit of an ugly duckling.  That it won’t always be about her.  Again an example about patience.

Patience, we really do need to teach our children about patience, because as Simon Sendik says about the Millennials Generation that I am slightly too old to be in, and are happening now, they were given a shitty hand, a bad set of playing cards and they don’t know how to deal with patience.  Because you can order something on Amazon and it arrives the next day, in some places within a couple of hours.  So they don’t understand patience.

Teaching patience.  I think it should be on every parent’s curriculum.

If you any good ideas beyond what I have shared here, I would love to hear them.

How do you teach your kids patience?

 

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.