Monday Gratitude

Here are a few things I’m grateful for going into this week:

1. That I feel fairly rested. Some weekends I feel like I spend my time chasing something I’ll never catch, and then I start my week feeling physically exhausted and also disappointed that I didn’t do better, which always feels like a moving target anyway. This past weekend, though, felt both energizing and restful and for that I’m grateful.

2. For a nice meeting with my writing group friends. Over the summer I roped a couple of my old grad school classmates into creating a writing group with me where we create a new prompt each month (ish) and we each write a short story based on that prompt. It’s always a lot of fun reading the stories and seeing how different (or sometimes similar!) they turned out. We hadn’t met since November because of the holidays, and it was fun getting back together and chatting.

3. We do yoga in the mornings now. Some rainy day last week I was trying to figure out how to keep my kid occupied indoors and I decided to try doing yoga together. I got out a mat for him and a mat for myself, put a 15-minute yoga video on the TV and he stomped gleefully on his mat the whole time. He now expects yoga every morning. He isn’t as participatory now, one week in – usually he hangs out on his mat for a minute or two before moving on to something else – but it still means I get to do yoga and that’s something I had not otherwise been able to fit into my day regularly.

4. My husband took the kid out a couple times yesterday so I could get my food prep done for the week. They went to the Museum of Flight in the morning and a brewery with a play area in the afternoon, and that got me about 3.5 solo hours for cooking. They had fun, and having all the food I need for the kid and I ready before Monday makes going into the week feel much more relaxed.

5. We had a great time at a party on Saturday night. We received the invitation just the night before from some down-the-street neighbors with a kid the same age as ours. As a person prone to social anxiety, a last-minute invitation typically makes me assume I’m not actually wanted there. But this party – a family-friendly Lunar New Year dumpling party hosted by some neighbors who have always seemed very nice – sounded too good for my anxiety to get in the way of. Their house was PACKED, but full of friendly faces and great food. We ran into several people we already knew and chatted with lots of new people. We’ve been struggling with doing this whole parenting thing alone, and are always hoping we’ll start forming relationships with other parents near us. Was this party a stepping stone to get us there? Who knows, but it was fun nonetheless.