Not Getting Any Easier

Today was a hard day. God bless my husband for putting up with my minor emotional breakdowns (and the major ones... but there was no hyperventilating crying going on today ... or any crying for that matter!... so I'm counting it as minor). I have a problem, and I'm not sure if other people are the same way or not, where I will just have one or two or sometimes three little things happen that stress me out and all of a sudden I'm running through the laundry list of things in my head that are stressing me out, getting more and more worked up, feeling more and more anxious and then it all just SNOWBALLS! As my husband pointed out to me today, none of those things are even related! There is no reason to let one affect the other.

I think my major issue today is that I just had this overwhelming feeling like I can't keep up. My house is a DISASTER, I desperately need to go grocery shopping, I fell off my diet bandwagon over the weekend and I was just feeling like there were not enough hours in the day today to get everything done. I'm just still not caught up on things after being gone for 10 days, home for 2 and then gone for another 2 and a half. So, this was my general mindset today. Then, I opened a letter from the mortgage company that our monthly payment was increasing by $100 a month on our rental house because of a shortage in escrow since our taxes and insurance went up. This was pretty much my tipping point. I think that was the major anxiety inducer. Then I went upstairs and was just OVERWHELMED with the smell of poop. I went into the bathroom and saw that the dogs had totally and completely ripped apart a disgustingly dirty diaper that I had left in the trash can from earlier and not yet taken outside. I was using disposable diapers today until I could get my gDiaper covers washed, so all of the gel filling from the diaper was all over the bathroom floor. The dogs have never done that before, so I thought nothing of leaving the diaper in the trash can there.

I told Matt tonight that I don't know when I'll start feeling the effects of the accomplishments I'm making on my list. When I look back, I feel like I have accomplished a lot in the past 5 weeks, but yet I still feel very stressed and anxious and lately have been having trouble falling asleep at night because my mind is always racing. The problem I am having now is that if I try and tackle long overdue items, then I'm neglecting my daily chores. If I focus on my daily chores, then I'm not accomplishing anything big from my list. I feel like I'm just failing at finding that balance between the two. My goal is to get into a good system at home with chores so that I have a free hour while Andy is napping to tackle a long overdue item. So far, I just haven't made it to that place. The same goes for gaining better control over our finances. January was the closest we've been able to stick to our budget in I don't know how long, but yet, we still didn't make any "extra" headway on debt.

I know I'm still figuring it all out as I go, and I'm trying really hard to remember that these things aren't going to happen over night. Matt reminded me that I wrote in my blog that I'm in this predicament from YEARS of neglecting things I should have taken care of. I am reminding myself that is why I think it will take me a full year to straighten my life out.

So tonight I washed all of my maternity clothes (yes, Andy is 17 moths old... please don't judge me!) and packed them up in a bin, where they will stay, nice and clean and organized until they are needed again (hopefully in the not so far away future)!