Project 52: Lesson 1

2013 Project 52

Over the past year I was drawn in by an old friend's new blog and an online project she had heard about called Project 52. The project was a challenge to take a picture a week for a year, usually taken on by new moms wanting to document their child's first year. After the year had come to a close this old friend decided to continue the project for the new year with a new theme: lessons. She wants to document a lesson every week that her daughter, and being a mom, has taught her. I thought it was a wonderful idea, and being the idea mooch that I am, I've taken on the challenge. For my purposes it will include lessons for me from the kids and our family experiences as well as lessons for them, inspirations and my hopes snd dreams for them, but every week will be some new insight into our family, about our family, for our family. And will likely include a picture or two every week. I'd likecto say one pic per kid. I've been meaning to revive the old blog anyway, a way to keep Aunty J in the loop as well as the mommy brain that will forget everything by lights out tonight. 

So here starts:

The Triple A Project 52: Family Lessons 

Lesson One:

Mama gets grouchy when she's bored!! (and everybody's grouchy when Mama's grouchy)

This is something I've finally put together after years of powering out of Christmas. I was also looking for ways to keep the kids from being overloaded at Christmas and stressing me out with the ever popular idea of holiday over stimulation. In my reflection I realized that for our family it's not overstimulation over the holidays that puts everyone on the edge. It's more likely a form of under stimulation! As much as there's people and toys everywhere, new scenery and tons of food, it's just not the right kind of stimulation. Sitting around talking with people is wonderful... but sedentary! New toys are great... but when the days are so full we don't have time for them, or we're so out of our routine and tired that we don't make the time to play, they're more anxiety provoking than stimulating. New scenery is good... but our routine (especislly with the well rounded daycare routine) stimulation is better. Tons of food is always fun to choose from... but ultimately it's all high fat and dipped in chocolate isn't it? There's really not that much variety when you think about it. 

So, in light of what came out as more of a whiny rant than anything, I've concluded that Christmas holidays (especially with as much time off as I took this year) are, in a sense, boring! I find after the crazy fun-ness of the actual days of Christmas are over, all I want to do is get a semblance of normalcy back and all I have is a messy house and too many distractions (aka lunch dates and opportunities to do things I can't when I'm working) that we end up forgetting how much we actually like our routine. And how much we need it.

Grouchy Mama.