Intentional 2020: Evening Routine (wk 2)

Ooookay....I think I'm getting paid back or punked for being willing to toot my own horn last week. Because, quite frankly.....I suck at the evening routine.

It's probably good that I didn't tackle this in week one because my momentum would be garbage trash.

I know why this week was harder. My willpower stores are low-low-low in the evenings. My brain is tired and just wants to fast forward to the in bed with a book part. And, evenings tend to be a lot more flexible and unpredictable. We get invited to dinners, Matt has to shuffle off to TKD class or he gets home late so dinner is late and then everything else is, too.

See, this is why I don't normally operate with time - it's just that with school-age kids, they need to be asleep at a decent hour, and I need to be asleep before it's too late or my morning routine won't happen. So I basically took the thing I suck at (sticking to timing and schedules), and jammed it into the part of my day when I have the least stamina. Cool cool cool.

OF COURSE I'm gonna blow it up.

Okay, to be fair - I was still intentional about it. In that I was aware and trying all along. I just didn't force each piece of my routine the way I should have.

I won't get into each of the nightly experiences, but I'll just say that starting with night one it was a disaster. It was the evening before my kids went back to school following their 16 day holiday break and they were putting off bedtime like it was a root canal. They wouldn't listen for shit, and went so far as to throw out a few grumpy, "I'm never going to bed!"s. Instead of flowing through the night with happy effort and self-care, I was stewing. So spicy.

It really didn't get much better. The following night our dinner plans fell through so everything ran late. The next night we had a goodbye dinner for my in-laws and didn't even get home until the kids' bedtime. Ugh. It was a mess.

Through it all, I was still good about cleaning up right after dinner. My sink has stayed shiny all week somehow, so...I guess there's that win. I still did my nightly yoga, I still kept up with my to do list and made time for reading until my eyes got sleepy. But I skipped the little things. I didn't put castor oil on my lashes most nights (did you know it makes them grow like those $$ lash serums?), I didn't do my crystal gratitude ritual. I FOR SURE wasn't asleep by 10:30. It was so easy to let the personally beneficial things go because they didn't make a clear difference to my sleep, my mood, my morning, the following day, etc. The things that didn't have obvious rewards got shaved away by my waning willpower. And, I dunno...maybe I should just let that be okay because I got the big things done - the things that made a difference to the flow of my days. But I kinda wanna subscribe to the good stuff too, ya know?

This battle isn't over, of course. I'm going to keep trying and adjusting as needed because I know that if I can just get my crap together, I'll be so happy with myself for doing all of this. So week 2: technically an overall success, but not a flawless one. A work in progress.

Next week is kind of a change-up. So far I've focused on the flow of my days and myself, and this week I'm looking a bit more outward. My oldest son turns 11 this week, so I decided to be intentional about him. I've got a list of ideas going...I'm pretty excited to make them happen and see how this effects both of us. I'm kind of obsessed with my kids, sooo getting intentional about one of them feels really invigorating and a great way to offset this week's lame-o effort. Onward!