Catching Up

 Last time I talked to my therapist, I told her, maybe blogging helped my depression! I was doing well! And, it's not that I'm doing very poorly, but I'm not doing quite so well right now. Oddly enough I think I'm struggling more with anxiety than depression lately, though of course depression is still looming over me. 

So! To catch up, I just got back from a trip to visit my parents. My mom came up first, helping clean up a little (we want to throw a party and invite people over but our house was a disaster). We actually did an okay job cleaning before she got here, but she attacked a bunch of little piles of stuff that have been accumulating since we moved. She was also going to do some fun things with me and the kids, but sadly I worked too hard cleaning so I didn't actually have energy. I wanted to go to the kite festival that's in Washington every year but had forgotten that Long Beach was actually two hours away?? So we thought maybe we'd do a beach trip on the way to visit grandma, but alas, we went to the museum the day before, and I made a carrot cake to celebrate my momma's birthday, so I was toooo tired. I hadn't packed, and the weather wasn't that good. Mom said it's supposed to be nice in a few weeks so, maybe? We'll try a day trip down to the beach. Or a weekend in Portland again. 

The only really weird part was when my mom offered to come up and spend time with the kids so Gary and I could go to the temple. I guess I could, I am kind of curious. Mom said there were more changes, and I think I've read some of them. It's not the way I'd really like to spend time with my husband but maybe I could do some "shadow work" - examining what makes me uncomfortable and exploring why. Actually, come to think of it, she could do that another time, I really need some date time with Gary. I'm struggling a bit, I'm afraid. The trip was nice in some ways, discouraging in others, in this regard. Kind of nice to be away, not as relieving as I thought to come home (I mean, I was really happy about the sleeping situation at home - that's tough with baby at my parents. 

Oh, so, yes I was a little sad because we never went to the beach, I was very limited in what we could do, but I learned from my last trip, and we just enjoyed what we could and I tried to let go of the rest. The kids were disappointed that we couldn't do the beach, but thankfully having bad weather was a nice buffer for my feelings - it wasn't JUST me that prevented us from going. 

Also it's nice to know my kids are really good at traveling now. One of them likes to ask when exactly we're getting there so she can look at the clock and set her expectations, and that can be frustrating when we run into traffic, but generally speaking if a movie is on they do really well. That child also tends to doze off on the long drives so that helps too. The older two download Spotify playlists and use their headphones to listen to music. (Maybe I should introduce them to audio books or podcasts, see if that's something they're interested in since they're constantly listening. Very intriguing idea.) 

I took this little quiz a while back about my mental state and it was like "hey, things might not be great but they'll probably be looking up soon!" and I'm wondering now if I took that same quiz if it was like "well, time to consider interventions." Yikes. 

Today my big anxiety is cleaning vs cake-making. Since we are having friends over, it's the home stretch, gotta get it done, no time to put it off. I'm not sure when exactly guests are coming, so I probably should make the cake today, so I need to start baking so they can cool. And then I can clean while they cool. Probably... 

Speaking of cleaning, husband and his brother went on a cleaning spree upstairs so now it's almost eerily clean. It's nice, though. Not exactly how I imagined it, but very nice to have it clean. 

Usually we buy ourselves an anniversary present - something fun and/or useful, or just something we couldn't impulse buy. Like that robot vacuum that we never use heh. We weren't going to do anything this year because inflation has hit us hard this summer, but maybe we'll squeeze more out of the budget anyway because our vacuum might be dying. As much as I would love to just use our robot vacuum, it takes planning ahead. We're not great at it. Planning ahead, that is. 

This has been nice and therapeutic. I'm glad I sat down to do it. However I am so hungry and need to get on with the other things I'm planning on doing today. Maybe later when I need another break, I can write about my baby going to middle school orientation. It's very bittersweet.