Ten Percent Better

The greatest accomplishment of this past month has been creating a schedule for school, and then sticking with it for four weeks. The kids look forward to school, they've been getting their chore chart check marks and Brooklyn took her nicely loaded debit card to Target last week to expand her Barbie collection (I found a cute filing tote while cleaning and we discovered that it's the perfect size for Barbie storage - and pink lined, to boot!) I've been told more than once, by both of them, that they love school. And the schedule has become sufficiently self sustaining that on the day I had a tension headache that laid me out I wasn't worried about what to do/what they were doing, because they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. It's wonderful.

A couple of months ago I mentioned the examen practice. I've continued doing that every week, and a couple of things I've really liked about it is how, with repetition, patterns become apparent, and also how those patterns are addressed with one small step: after examining the past week, what would I like to mitigate or embrace in the coming week? One week at a time, one change at a time, moving toward a better future.

I could look at all the things I didn't get done this past month. I could get bogged down in how bad my sleep hygiene was (it really was atrocious) or that one whole week where I fell down a rabbit hole with a game on my phone (it has since been deleted), or how little writing I did. Or I could focus on how one small change (creating a workable daily routine) made all our lives more than ten percent better.

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