Focus

Focus. It is a smallish word with a lot of meaning.
Sometimes I have a lot of it, sometimes I have very little of it. Still other times, I can focus so intently on 1 or 2 things, but can't seem to even focus a little bit on other things.

I am at a place in life right now where focus seems to be a bit of a commodity and a rare one, at that. That's not to say that life is bad- it isn't -but I'm spending so much time being serious about so many things that focusing on any ONE thing to do it very well has become very taxing.

This weekend (and probably the 2 weeks leading up to it) has been one of the times in my life where I feel like I am below the "adequate" line in every aspect of my life. My home is a mess, I feel like I lose my temper far too often (especially where my kids are concerned) and I have so much on my mind that finding FOCUS has become a real challenge. Simply forcing myself to sit down and write this blog post is challenging. I should be: cleaning, preparing, budgeting, sleeping or so many other things.

I know that I'm not unique in this - many other people have a time (or times) like this in their life. I can look through the muddy water and see that my unclear moments are due to all of the shifts in my life, specifically the techtonic-plate-shift that was adding my 2nd child to our family. She is 9 months old now and we are in simple survival mode. To get anything done, it becomes a major event. We've got the basics down- like going to visit someone or going out to eat- those are "easy" things today. The challenge is the things that USED to be easy.

Cleaning my house.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I am no Martha Stewart. I'm not even Martha Stewar'ts 2nd cousin who got half a cleaning gene. Clutter is part of my life. However, I do like organized chaos in my clutter and I do not have that now. To clean ONE room in my house now is a major ordeal. While my husband and I use to be able to work together on that, it isn't possible anymore. One of us has to be with both kids while the other works to exhaustion to clean a room- you know it is bad when you start to bicker over who gets to clean so you can escape the kids for awhile. . .

Fitness
This is the one area that I have maintained focus. Even with all my chaos- I'm proud that I've kept up. I make it to work out a minimum of 4 days a week, more likely 5x and some weeks, even 6 days. I'm now strength training 2-3x a week. In terms of the scale- it isn't budging (but at least it isn't going up either). I hope that that is mainly due to building muscle and trading out some fat for it right now creating a neutral situation. Admittedly, I could be more clean with my eating- there was a State Fair incident yesterday. I have not been running as many miles as I used to when training for races, but I'm focusing on overall body fitness and have added other activities like swimming and biking into the mix.

State Fair
All excuses aside, I don't regularly eat that kind of stuff even once a week in small doses- so one day of really off the charts stuff can be reversed- but what a difference a year makes. One of my (former) state fair faves - fried veggies - was on my list yesterday. We always share it- and usually finish it off. Yesterday- there was at least 1/3 of it left before we threw in the towel- the grease was making me feel ill. I don't even think I want to get them next year. We also did the fried butter, yes- I said it. Fried Butter. I wanted to know what the buzz was about -it was way over the top. Good, but not something I'd eat again either. My favorite thing at the fair was the 3 chocolate covered popcorn balls we bought and brought home and are stretching out over several days.

It is definitely time to get more serious on the food-focus front.

Blog
While I know I don't "owe" anyone a blog post and that I started this for myself - the point of starting it was so that I kept myself focused and accountable - even when some things are going well, I think I was avoiding the blog to have to put some of it out there.

It may not be fully linear- and some of it may not make full sense either (in my defense, it's getting later in the night) - but I feel a bit of relief having unloaded a lot of what's been floating in this head of mine.