AROUND HERE, SMALL VICTORIES

Sam has only napped one afternoon out of the last six.  

Up until this week, he has taken a two to three hour nap five or six days per week.

I'm still crossing my fingers that this isn't a permanent change and I need to spend some time figuring out a plan for instituting afternoon quiet time.  Any suggestions?

With this change in our daily schedule, I feel like I've had zero time to myself.  I've felt scattered and, come 7:30pm, exhausted.  

And yet, it's been a good week.  A few small victories have been game changers.

I found an app that allows me to resize blog photos from my phone.  (This is the one I'm using.)  Prior to this, I had a crazy process of taking photos with my DSLR, downloading them to my computer, emailing them to myself to open and edit on my phone (usually using a few different apps to get them from their original state to share-worthy), emailing them back to myself to open and resize on the computer and then uploading to the blog.

Now that I've written it out, I can see that my process is still kind of crazy, but I've eliminated one big and time-consuming step.  Every time that I take advantage of my new resizing app I save myself several minutes and feel like I'm getting away with something.  It's pretty great.  

Small victory number two: I've been reading.  Books.  I actually started this daily habit on the first (thanks to inspiration from Saroy).  I finished Wild.  I am reading Smart Money Smart Kids.  And, just today I paid my giant library fine, so now I can go back to checking out books and ebooks from the library.

I love to read.  I am thankful that I've forced myself to take time for this, even though it has been a somewhat hectic week.  

We've been walking (and running/dancing around the house) like crazy people.  Brian and I are competing in a "Workweek Hustle" challenge, via the FitBit app, with my sister and her boyfriend.  The competition has been fierce and a bit ridiculous, but also fun.  Besides the connection with our Seattle buddies - which is great - we have spent a lot of time playing music from the Frozen soundtrack while running/dancing/chasing around our living room and kitchen.  If you are looking for a fun family activity, we highly recommend this.  Our evenings may not be exciting, but we have fun.  

All in all, it's been a good week.  I'd be happier if I could say all this PLUS say that I had an hour (or even half an hour) to do my own thing in the middle of each afternoon.  But, you take what you get and you don't throw a fit.  Or something like that.