On Friday, I took the day off. No chores. No laundry. No cooking. None of my usual duties. Things have been so intense and there is still more to go- I knew if I didn’t stop and refuel the next leg was going to be even more difficult. My brain has been so fried, more so than I’ve ever been used to. I mean, I’m a mother of six. I’m used to thinking on multiple tracks and noting things all the time. But this medical stuff? It’s for the birds. I have pages and pages of notes from talking with this insurance, that doctor, this test, that billing supervisor– and all of our appointments are logged automatically into our Google calendar so that our phones will yell and ding and buzz at us in plenty of time to get wherever we need to go– but even so, details keep slipping. It’s pretty overwhelming. I really needed to ‘get out of my head’ for the day.

I was able to read part of a book I’d really been wanting to get into. I sipped all the hot coffee I wanted. (Most of the time it cools before I drink it because of this or that.) And I scrapped. I blasted the Fiddler on the Roof Pandora mix, which has a pleasant mix of show tunes and sang along at the top of my lungs. It was exactly what I needed.

I am not going to deny how very hard self-care has been for me the last few years. It is a bit ironic that the caregivers in medical situations who often need a refuel the most almost always don’t get what they need for the very uncertainty and rapid schedule changes that happen with medical needs. It also doesn’t help that the primary caregiver has become the ‘expert’ on the patient(s), either, which makes it hard to translate for someone else to step in so that we can step back and rest. But it has to happen. I am determined to get creative about meeting my needs so that I can pour out better. No one can give on an empty tank and running on fumes helps no one. I deserve more; my family deserves more. It feels so good to look at these pages. Telling the story is so important to me, and it fills me up in so many ways.

I joined my mom for a scrapbooking date this Saturday at a local crop. (Yes, they still happen, no, scrapping isn’t dead yet!) I’ll admit the last couple of times I have attended I didn’t get anything done- just sat and stared and pushed the paper around. The muse was not there. This time, however, things were hopping. I got these five done (the Coppelia is a two pager) and could have kept going well into the night. My fingers are itching to finish the others that were in my head from Saturday—and we won’t talk about how very long it has been since that has happened! Years! It is a great feeling- I’ve missed this aspect of myself quite a bit. All the pictures are from at least two years ago, sometimes earlier than that. If anything has changed since I first started scrapping, I have definitely learned to date or put an age somewhere on the page- when I look back at older work, I’m really hard pressed to figure out when it was and have to look for clues in the background photos. Save yourself some consternation later!

I keep thinking I’ve found the last of my completed pages waiting for albums, and then I find a few more. I really think this is the last of them, because there are no more un-cleaned-out storage boxes that could fit 12 x 12 pages…but…I could be wrong. These were completed this February, I think. I never would have thought I had so many little cubby holes that these got shoved into. I have more than enough to go into an album, but some of these belong in the children’s albums. Currently all of our albums are stored in a leather ottoman behind our couch. When we found the ottoman originally, it was the perfect solution for the scrapbooks- they were perfectly accessible but also protected. Alas, alack, I have very rough and tumble boys and that poor ottoman is a lot worse for wear. I need to have a better system for storing completed pages until they can get put in the albums and I also need a better system of knowing what stories need to be told from what has already been covered. Don’t even get me started on my digital files…anyways. Enjoy!