“Kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong, and can cause harm.” – Terry Goodkind ๐๏ธ
Last Week: I wonder if I can be the person I want myself to be? If I can keep growing into it, or if I will burn out and backslide into who I was.
This Week: Our scout group keeps doing well and growing, sometimes it scares me because I wonder if I can keep up, I wonder if I can be enough? But as long as I try maybe I can.
HEALTH OVERVIEW:
Mental Health: I was worried about our art director because she had to move all of a sudden, now she is moved, it’s just a bit better, but I still feel unsettled.
Physical Health: Want to pull the trigger on exercising more, and getting more energy each day, the kids are getting a bit more independent also, so maybe I should just start with 5 minutes.
Social Health: My Fridays switched from my house to downtown, so maybe we can drive in with my sister, and then pick her up, and then have her drop us off, then have my husband pick us up.
LIFE JOURNAL:
“Without forgiveness life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.โ
– Roberto Assagioli
โThere is no small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world.โ
–Mary Anne Radmacher
Saturday: Last week fighting off being sick and then I didn’t get sick, so totally worth it to get some rest. We lost our pet lizard to probably botulism, my daughter was crying at night, then I drank a lot of coffee to go to the cave, my husband was going to bring my kids, but took them shopping instead. ๐ฅ It was hard to get going, but I felt like if I could get going then I would be okay and be glad I did and it was true. This week was a super special cave trip, I’ve gone to the caves many times, but going together with 12 of us scouts was even more fun. We had 4 girls and 8 boys, I always liked that. Many of us have boys and girls, so making two trips to two different clubs would keep one or the other kid out of scouts altogether. Also in “Smarter, Better, Faster” a book on the neuroscience of teamwork, by Charles Duhigg they say mixed-gender groups outperform both male and female only groups. A lot of scrapes happened, but there were beautiful spots of light and green coming through the top, or speckles of rose, gold, and silver minerals on the cave ceiling, and many types of lava. In the future we could have cleaned the table with a rag and vinegar, but we did the best with what we brought, one scout used flint to start a fire, four tried and got sparks, everyone who wanted got glowing dino legos to remember the cave. I think overall people had a good time, the more you scraped yourself it definitely affects the immediate review, but in memory I wonder if they will remember more the beauty that they were there, being with friends, or the scrapes? We raised $360/600 for our 501 fee and it feels like we will get there soon, I’m excited that the group feels cohesive, like we are working together and sharing the burden, and that we can grow into what we want to be available for our kids.
Sunday: Last week I saw the big dipper with my husband. This week was a bit thrown off by the rotors of the car needing to be replaced, my husband was working on that but needed a certain tool he didn’t have to release a pin or something, so in the end, he didn’t get it done and was frustrated. My sister and I took a load of trash with an old chair, old cabinet, trash, and the lizard cage. We aren’t planning to replace my daughter’s lizard, it was nice having it, but we aren’t going to keep getting crickets and changing the water and all that, it was an experience and now it’s over. I feel like it’s the end of an era of my kids being really young, now they are 3 and 6, starting to get more able to do things, both pretty potty trained, both able to talk. The little one is still pretty little, but we have no more babies, toddlers and up now. All of us are starting to get more responsible now, I see I’ve grown up a lot with my kids.
Monday: Last week my husband stayed home and took us out for boba, burgers, and walking the town. This week it’s a kind of normal Monday, I woke up tired and was taking it easy. I want to buy an archery bow, but didn’t, I’ll make a note of it and wait for a good time instead of just impulse buying it. Instead, I paid $176 for my husband’s speeding ticket, or I guess he did… I’ll ask about when I can get the bows.
I made this graphic today, if anyone wants to help you can donate via Patreon for $1 or $10 ext. Anything helps right now that we are in an in-between phase to be able to start qualifying for government grants, also if anyone knows about current grants for STEM or Early Education Learning please email info or links to adventurescoutshawaii@gmail.com we are lacking someone who knows how to handle the business side of having a Non-Profit still.
At home my daughter is doing really well in science, she is doing dimensional analysis in General Chemistry right now, and the combination of Eureka’s explanation as well as the other stuff we have done is making this hard subject more approachable. My son, who is 3, is doing 2-digit by 2-digit subtraction, I’m explaining it as bananas and boxes of 10 bananas and he is doing alright, at first I’m showing him how it goes, then he participates halfway. Right now, we are not quite at the stage my son does the math independently and that’s okay, I’m only even covering it because that’s where we ended up in the 1st-grade math class we are working on.
My daughter played games for an hour today with her best friend, then took a lunch break, she said “It is better to take a break after playing games.” It took a long time to get there, either one or two years. I really like games, but it causes fights, it causes more work of having to set limits, but then it creates discipline, it creates a bit of choice, tech skills, perhaps math or creative skills. But there is the idea that too much isn’t good, consumption without creativity becomes hollow, and addiction doesn’t help life become balanced. My husband doesn’t want any more than 2 hours of non-educational games, but I can enforce that, that seems fair, it seems fair that he excludes educational games for language or math ext. I didn’t like when he would make comments that he didn’t want the kids playing games, as if he was a victim, instead of being proactive and just saying I want this limit, how can we do this? But now that I know his limit and it seems fair I like the harmony of his limit and mine matching up as parents. My daughter gets her math and chemistry, language, and piano done right away to play her games, so in that way they are educational and I always check up on what she is playing so I know it’s not too scary or more violent than we are comfortable with or too whinny in tone (which a lot of games are). I don’t like a victim mentality, nor casting women in outdated gender roles, so I check games for that, it’s good to check for whatever you don’t want in your children’s life trying to sneak in, no matter what it is you are trying to exclude.
I’m starting to grow into my role as a guardian, I found it consuming for a long time, now after about 7 years, I’m starting to be at peace. I’m starting to see success in some ways and that makes the work worth it, but it’s scary not knowing if the hard work means something or if one day a bad decision will cause your kid to show up at an elementary school as a shooter rather than an alumni guest speaker.
Tuesday: Last week I was trying to sort through my things. Five weeks ago I wrote some school notes: that I wanted to focus on enthusiasm, breaking skills down, patience, more enthusiasm, and changing the system as needed to fit the student and encourage the kids to study smarter so you can learn more and contribute to your own well-being and that of others. My daughter continues to do really well in the academic side of life, my son hit a bit of a difficult bump with math, I’m sure he will sort it out, for awhile we will cover other subjects so he can keep thinking about it, then we will come back to it with pictures.
Wednesday: Last week my son was very needy and I had patience with it and we had a nice time at the beach. This week I was a little too drained to cater to my son more than my normal, his dad came to hang out with him, but had to leave to drop off someone with a broken car, it becomes a pain that the car is broken, or a loose end at least. We took big blocks and the big blocks were so fun, I don’t know how long they will be fun for, but they were fun again today and that was nice.
Thursday: Last week I was kind of resting up for the cave trip. This week I went to help a friend who had moved, we scrubbed a lot of baseboards, couldn’t do the floor too much, maybe halfway, because things were getting unpacked. We did a lot, we covered just a bit of digital drawing.
Friday: Last week had my coding/math/baking friends over. This week I went over to them again to help with their move, but we also did the cooking over there. We didn’t cover coding, but we did cover the first element of General Chemistry. We also cooked green onion pancakes, and pizza, and mochi.
The week ended cleaning up together and cooking with friends, it was nice, it really felt like a healthy community.
Something new this week: Made good pizza, almond flour might be great for cookies, but regular flour workers much better for pizza, the almond flour we have is bitter, either it’s old or it’s just too bitter for pizza.
Something good this week: Able to help a friend.
Something unexpected: I really liked the Okonomiyaki pancake sauce with vinegar and fresh ginger, I wasn’t really interested in eating it, but when I did eat it, it was delicious.
Born to Be Alive 