Out of Balance

My life has been slightly out of balance for the last few weeks. It always amazes me how delicate the balance really is. It only takes a tremor in one area of our lives to slowly work its way through the rest of our life and suddenly WHAM you have no food in the house and 2 weeks worth of laundry to tackle.

It think if I were to pinpoint the tremor, it would be when our department had to start working short staffed. Everyone dug in and started working harder, more efficiently cutting breaks short, not out of office lunch trips for errands or just to go out for lunch. We pulled up our socks and tighten our belts.

I started doing the same thing at home striving to get out of the house a little earlier so I could get to work a little earlier hoping I could get one of two more things done to ease the increasing workload.

I started cutting corners at home, not taking the extra time to menu plan and plan my shopping trips. I stopped planning my spending. I started going to bed earlier because I knew I needed my rest to keep up with the demands I would face the next day.

Slowly but surely things started to build up or unravel or just plain implode.

I finally hit the wall when I realized the kids were eating fast food for the 3rd time this week and the baby spinach I had bought 2 weeks ago was rotten in the fridge.

I realized I had spent over double our plan for food and entertainment on snack food and fast food but didn't have any meat in the fridge of freezer to make a decent meal.

I realized I couldn't have made the meal if I did have the ingredients because I was running the edge, leaving work late enough that I hit traffic and wasn;t getting home until 5:30 and it would be 6:30 before we would eat. The night we weren't eating fast food we were eating peanut butter wraps and jelly sandwiches.

I skipped the kids bathes a few nights.

I stopped blogging, twittering, emailing and calling (my friends, my community)

I realized I didn't even care.

I was out of balance and as a result my family, my finances and my life was out of balance.

It all took less than a month.

What is sad is that even though I knew I was out of balance, I still didn't know how I was going to fix it.

I kept my monthly massage and reflexology appointments I even scheduled a facial, because intellectually I knew I need to take some time for me. But was I really getting any benefit from these appointments when I was constently worried about the back up building at home?

It has taken a mild illness of one of my kids for me to have to say NO to a few obligations, including working late, to be tethered to the house with my child for a few things to happen.

1) for me to work on getting caught up (laudry, menu planning, cooking, grocery shopping)
2) to realize that I can't wait until one of the kids gets sick to get caught up (I really don't want them to be sick)
3) start to formulate a plan on how to deal with this out of balance existence

Having to say NO to some obligations was the start and let me tell you that really hurt. These were long standing traditional events that I participate in every year. This HURT so bad that I want to make a plan to ensure I will never have to say NO to these types of events EVER Again.

Stay tuned to find out how I am formulating my plan to get back in balance.

Shannon