Be less serious

It’s been an awfully serious week. Even last weekend I mostly worked on the house. What did I do that was “less serious”? It took conscious effort to make myself do a couple of fun things when all that was on my “one track” mind was tasks for the house project. Saturday evening I took off a few hours to spend with D, and Sunday night, I cut off staining shakes at 8pm so that I could take sauna. I guess that’s it, though!

Worked at the house this morning and then went to town and ordered the kitchen cabinets and bought a 5-gallon bucket of green stain for our next project.

When I got back, D had the sauna hot and we enjoyed a very relaxing/invigorating sauna, followed by time just hanging out at home. Lovely!

The day didn’t start out very playfully: up early and off to work. And when I was done with that, I immediately changed into my painting clothes and spent the next 5 hours breathing stain fumes! But I had something fun to look forward to: an adult evening out! We met two other couples in town for cajun dinner and conversation. It’s been AGES since we did something like this, and it felt great. We were back by 9 and now I’m ready for beddy (what a party animal!) It reminded me how fun it is to get out once in a while, and that it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Kind of fell apart on this goal today … worked all day and then went home and worked on home projects. Not a bad day, but no conscious effort at this goal …

I spent most of the day driving. To make it more fun/less serious, I only listened to podcasts 1/2 the time and sang the rest of the time. Good hormones!

We made apple cider with our neighbors tonight! It’s become a tradition over the past four years. Back then, we invited them to join us and it became our 4H club activity. We still say it’s a club activity, but really, we’d do it even if we didn’t have a club, just because it is FUN and it TASTES GOOD!

Busy day, this Tuesday! But I still managed to do a couple fun things during the day:
- took a walk during lunch
- stopped at a furniture store to browse for 10 minutes
- went applepicking with D&C after work. We plan to make a little apple cider tomorrow evening with friends :-)

Today I did the following:
- stayed in town longer than I wanted to in order to allow C to do something she really wanted to do
- and I made the most of it by window shopping at a favorite shop. These things are not necessarily easy for me to do, as once I reach my mental limit with shopping, I am really DONE and want nothing to do with it. So I’m not sure this sounds like being less serious, but it certainly required self-discipline to chill out.
- I wore a bright outfit with pink and green and my wild rolled paper earrings … just for fun!

Off to a pretty good start:
- smiley-face pancakes
- arranged to spend some time with my sweetie BEFORE doing chores
- invited our friend A. for dessert and tea tonight. It was the first time we’ve gotten together in months. Felt great!
- didn’t get the checkbook balanced—that’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning!

as recently as yesterday. I am a fun-loving person, yet I am also motivated by responsibility. And I see that this makes me more serious than some. Even though it was really a rough week and I felt awful and tired last night, I made myself stay up and watch a “funny” movie w/my husband and son, even though it really was dumb (they agreed), simply because I felt I should make an effort to “play” with them.

Then, just today, my daughter and were working together on some staining for the house project. It’s fun working with her, as she is vivacious and very talkative—really fun to be around. And in the course of conversation she said something like, “Well you’ve got to admit that you are a fairly serious person, Mom.” I had to agree.

This confirms my feeling, though, that while I appreciate my serious side, there’s been way to much serious crap to deal with the past 4 or 5 years, and I would like to make a conscious effort to focus on fun and funny for a while.

So, I’m not sure what I’ll do exactly to make this happen, but I’m going to try to focus on it for one month and see how much progress I can make!

Here goes!