Pancakes, blogging and other things

It’s Saturday morning and I have been awake for about 3 and a half hours already and it’s only 8:45 am.  I have helped make two pumpkin pies, made my own grain free pumpkin pancakes (yum!) and have also assisted the making of bacon and pancakes for 6 children.

But now I am sitting at my desk (another small victory to be at a desk and not typing on my lap in some random corner of the living room), eating my pumpkin pancakes and sipping on my first cup of tea of the day.  Bliss…  It’s taken me all week to sit down at my desk to write.  I miss it so much but the days seem to fly by weeks at a time and I am just trying to make sure I’m awake at the right time of each day.  It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between night and day and I pretty much feel the same at both times.

Oh yes, it’s that time of the year again when hubby is studying most hours and sleeping for the rest and kids activities seem to triple and the calendar just explodes with events.  And that is why I look forward to Christmas so much every year.  My husband will actually have some time off from work where he gets to be with the family instead of at the library studying, and it’s cold enough outside to make it perfectly acceptable to stay indoors in our pi’s…all week long.

Saturday was another one of those calendar explosion days.  My amazingly gorgeous nieces slept over and we all headed up to Leatherhead to my brother’s house for an EPIC Thanksgiving meal with friends followed by racing down to Billingshurt for the Christmas Fair where I had a stall booked to sell my beauty products.

I still need to figure out what food to bring to the Thanksgiving meal and have two batches of body butter to make, jar up and label for the Christmas Fair.  This could be a very long day.  But what I have learned is that if I stop and think too much about all the work I have to do I get overwhelmed from the work load and become “stress paralysed” as they say in the movie “Mom’s night out”.  That is so a real thing!

I know you mum’s know what I’m talking about.  You start off making your to-do list and then you become frozen by the volume of work that needs to be done while having a mild panic attack about how much more work there will be if you keep sitting still.  But you just can’t seem to move and face all the work because the thought of it all just STRESSES you out – stress paralysis!  Very, very sad, but yet very real.

So my defence mechanism against such “stress paralysis” is to just keep moving.  You just do one thing and then the other until all the work is done.  You basically turn into Jason Bourne from the Bourne Identity. The more pressure and stress he was under the quicker and harder he would work.  Brilliant, but I believe this is not exclusive to highly trained secret government agents.  Us mum’s can do this too!  I do it all the time at my work, at home with the kids doing housework and any other place that requires exhaustive amounts of work.  Just keep moving.  Don’t give up, don’t think about it and just keep going.

Everybody has to do hard work and even though our work as mum’s can sometimes play some cruel psychological jokes on us, we’re not any worse off than any mother out there – or so my mother keeps telling me?!?

So if you’re caught up in the extra doses of hard work and stress this time of year can bring – just breathe and keep going.  It will come to an end – Hallelujah!  Christmas will come, holiday’s will arrive and we can finally sit down with a hot drink and enjoy our families.

Happy Holidays x