2003-02-05 - 3:03 p.m.

Glorious, glorious day!

It's half past two in the afternoon and I just now turned on the computer. That's quite unusual considering that I woke up at 8 this morning. Oh, speaking of which, I need to write a checkmark on my calendar for that...

I decided to track my goal progress directly on my calendar instead of in a separate book. I need a reason to look at the calendar every day else I'll miss something important. So far I have 4 checkmarks for waking & sleeping times for the month. Not bad considering it's the 5th :o) That's 4 out of 9.. much better than my average was at the end of January.

I feel like I'm settling into a more work-oriented routine now that I've thoroughly enjoyed having some time off. Life is good.

Today I make it a goal to try to talk about my feelings more. During my shower I started thinking of a stressful situation and then I remembered that a good way to deal with being in those is to stop arguing with people and just tell them how you feel. I know that I don't talk about my feelings enough. It makes me hide inside myself and pretend I don't have feelings when really I need to be more open with others. Actually, I need to find the right balance between hiding all my feelings and wearing my heart on my sleeve.

So anyway, this morning I went with the kids and mom to our local homeschooling playdate. The families all meet in a local building and do whatever activities come around, like dancing and singing, or just playing with toys. Generally making up for the social time that is missed from not being in school, I think.

Today I brought my watercolour supplies in and to my surprise every single kid wanted to paint.. haha it was great although I used a lot of my (expensive) paint. I was going to hand out pages from a watercolour paper book that my mom had bought me, but thankfully she noticed and gave me a bunch of scrap paper to bring instead. I hadn't noticed that the booklet she bought me was top-notch stuff and has only about 12 sheets in the whole book.

It's funny.. I thought about it at the time and want to write my feelings about it now. I was overjoyed at seeing the expressions on the kids faces and loved giving them the chance to paint with top notch paint. I suppose I could have given them crappy paint since they are just kids and not out to make a masterpiece just yet, but still, I like to share my stuff, especially the best stuff.

My mom seemed a little worried that I would use up too much of my paint but I don't share that philosophy. I mean, I can just buy more. It's paint. I think the value that was gained in the world from those kids getting to do whatever they wanted with colours was worth more than the cash value I will hand over when I buy more paint.

Speaking of my mom.. I love her :o) Lately I've really come to appreciate her a lot more and realize that I owe her a lot for making me the way I am. I'm a little copy of her in a lot of ways, and it's nice to see that the things I love about myself are in her too. I'm especially impressed with how she listens to the advice I give her regarding my brother and sister.

Since I've moved in here, I've been caught off guard by the severity of tone she uses with them sometimes and once or twice I've been around when an unpleasant confrontation happened between her and one or another (or both) of the kids. I happen to have a way with kids where I seldom fight with them, and they are almost always pleasant and cheerful in my presence. So I feel like I couldn't witness my mom getting unnecessarily angry at the kids without saying anything.

[ps I'm choosing my words very carefully today. Interesting]

Like this morning... my brother Tristan, who is 5, barged into the kitchen talking at the top of his voice while my mom and I were talking. She got understandably frustrated at his interruption and spoke to him about it pretty harshly. It wasn't so much that she raised her voice, but she used a tone of voice that implied her anger and meant just as much agression without being very loud.

After he left, I was quiet for a bit. (I've noticed when there's tenseness around I get quiet and introspective.. feel like I'm hiding sort of.) Then I spoke up and told my mom matter of factly that I thought it would work better if she told him that she felt upset at his interruption and left it at that. I was still thinking in terms of my thoughts during my shower: that explaining how you feel is the way to handle a difficult situation.

I told her that I didn't think her way of dealing with the situation was really effective. In retrospect, I'm even more impressed that she didn't take this the wrong way and assume I meant she didn't know how to raise her kids. Rather, she understood that as a third party I could see things more clearly since I wasn't really involved.

From my point of view, it looked like a rambunctious kid hopped into the room full of energy and was overpowered by a high-strung adult. He came in all excited and left subdued and muted.

It wasn't so much that I don't think a serious tone of voice should ever be used with kids. She had enough reason to speak like that since she's been trying to get him to stop interrupting for some time. However, I do think that gently reminding kids and having extra patience will do the trick sooner in most cases.

I'm thinking of my friend Sue right now. Damn, she is cool. I learned a lot about how to raise kids from her after seeing her around her nephew Cody. She is the kind of person who you are supremely grateful to have around when things get difficult because she will totally defuse the situation and make everyone see that there is no reason to fight and all the reason in the world to be happy together.

Heheheh ok, I have a thing for Sue. I know that I want the person I end up with to be like her. Except for the kid thing. She doesn't want to have any of her own, unfortunately. So I am on a quest to find someone very much like her.

It helps to have someone in mind when you go looking :o)

Oh.. I've been doing this for a long time. I need to go do the vacuuming because it's 3 already and I'm picking Niki up at 5:00.

Phew.. what a great entry :) I feel like I really got some things down that I wanted to write about. It's not so often that I'm satisfied with the entries I write.

hehhe.. I know I'm supposed to be finished, but I want to write one more thing that I was thinking about lately.

It was about frequency and quality of entries. I was thinking specifically of Lisa, and how much I love to read her diary because she waits until the moment she has enough to say and is in the mood to say it. Her diaries are witty and well put together. She basically uses a good amount of creative energy in writing each entry.

I, on the other hand, will write just about anything off the top of my head, which might be a detailed record of what I had for breakfast that day. My goal in writing this diary is to write in it every day, so I am willing to sacrifice quality over quantity. This may sound strange if you don't know me, but otherwise the kind of entries I wrote today wouldn't get written. I'm just not disciplined enough to write in here every few days or once a week. If I didn't write "daily" (except for when I forget.. *sheepish*) then I would go for .. hmm, let's say 3 months without an entry. In that time I would have thought of 1,000,587 things that I *really* wanted to write in my diary but just wouldn't get around to it. Yes, this is me.

Anyway, really time to vacuum.

I'm not putting it off, honest! ;)

.

Ok, now I'm putting it off.

Haha.. yeah I rock.

Mr procrastination.

Did I tell you about the time I was going to get that book about procrastination? :oP No.. that's not how it goes. I can never remember jokes.

maybe: "I keep meaning to go to the library to get a book on procrastination".

Ok, this is overboard. I meant to make a joke of putting off vacuuming but I didn't mean to write more than a few lines. How devious our minds can be...

pps

now I'm really not just putting off vacuuming hahahahaha lol. REALLY!

I just had to add that I forgot to write yesterday. Shame shame.. and the reason is that I played Natural Selection all night from around 10pm feb 3rd to 9:30am feb 4th. *sheepish, again* So yeah, that's ok, since I"m on vacation, but really, I want to get to sleep and wake up at certain times.

That is my goal!

But for now, my goal is to end this entry.

With a period.

How about.... um.. this one -> .

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