Today is a good day. Christmas, in general, was pretty good this year. I think I was preparing myself for it being super stressful, and it was better than my expectations. Don't get me wrong, I did start having an anxiety attack yesterday morning in the midst of all the present opening, but my anti-anxiety medication and some deep breathing made the difference there. I've been trying to take time for myself too. I got a workout in Christmas Eve and one today. Nasser's been doing a ton with the kids so that I can take more breaks, but then the kids have also been playing a lot of video games over the past several days. We don't intend to let that be the trend all of the holiday break, but a few days with several hours a day isn't so bad, right? I remind myself that keeping my sanity at this time is important too.
The holidays can be really hard. All the consumerism, accumulation of presents, trying to celebrate with people far away, trying to make it perfect for our kids, while feeling all the stress and expectations to be happy. It can really be too much sometimes. I think in previous years, I expected too much out of the holidays. I've said before that I can really be a winter person, but part of it is the holidays. I love the Christmas season in a lot of ways, but I block out the stress when I think about the season. And every year, I expect it all to go perfectly, but then I inevitably get stressed, something veers from the plan, and I feel like a failure. This year, I expected to be late to the family get-togethers (while planning for early), I didn't sign up for all that much cooking, I baked way fewer batches of cookies than normal, I expected the bottles of homemade vanilla to break on their way to Chicago but ended up pleasantly surprised when they didn't, I tried to worry less about how people were going to like our carefully thought-out gifts, I didn't try to schedule our days ridiculously packed, and I'm accepting that our kids love video games and allowing them some of that is A-ok.
It worked.
Surprisingly, unexpectedly, joyously, this year was better.
Rationally, I know that a lot of my issues stem from having expectations for myself, for those around me, for events, etc that aren't realistic. But it's hard to change those expectations. I didn't consciously decide to lower all my expectations for the holidays this year. But I think I've finally learned from the past. And I think Nasser expected me to have a hard time, so everytime I got close, he was there saying, ok what can we do to prevent this? Let's have you take a break, get a shower in, whatever I needed.
I will blog more later. For today, I'm keeping this short and enjoying my lazy day. I suppose I don't even need to call it lazy. I got a run in, in the cold and snow; that's damn successful!
Oh, and here are some more tattoo drawings. I don't love today's attempts, and I learned that drawing on my foot is awfully difficult.
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