Reclaiming My Mornings

I'm on vacation right now. I'm spending three weeks of my summer in Maine visiting my husband's home state and many of his relatives. It's kind of a last hurrah because his parents are selling their house here to move closer to us.

Side note: Apparently, Maine ... as a state ... has a short attention span. On the day before the first day of summer, it was about 75 degrees. NOT summer, by my Hotlanta standards. Then, on June 20 ... the first day of summer ... whoa, Nelly! It was 91 degrees. We had three ... count 'em THREE ... days of 80+ degree weather before spring returned and I put on sweaters again. My father-in-law tells the story of a visitor to his medical office who asked a nurse what "Mainers" do in the summer. Her response: "Well, if it happens on a weekend, we have a picnic." Our summer long-weekend happened on a Wednesday - Friday, but we managed to have a picnic anyway.

OK. Back to my purpose in writing this.

I may be on vacation, but I am already dreaming of getting home. Why? Because I'm going to make some fundamental changes about how I spend my time.

You may be asking, "Why, pray tell, would you do that?"

Well, thank you for asking. Because I feel guilty as all get-out. I just finished a teeny-tiny Kindle book called What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. It took all of about two hours to read ... and frankly would have taken less than that if I'd read it in a single sitting ... but it's got my mind churning about all of the time I waste. In a day. In a week. In a year. In the last 40 years.




And most of the things I'm feeling most guilty about right now all normally happen in the a.m.

1. This blog. I haven't written since March, I think. I'm actually too scared to look back and see.
2. My morning quiet times. According to my Daily Bible I'm on June 6. But that's only because around June 1 I decided to skip forward from April 22 and not give myself a hard time about all those days inbetween that I didn't read. See how well that's working? It's June 23 and I'm on June 6.
3. My hand-written book of Proverbs. I'm supposed to be hand-writing the entire book in 2012. I'm on Chapter 6. In six months, I've done 6 chapters. That means in the next six months, I have to do 15 chapters. 
4. Exercise. I have exercised more in the last week (4 times in a week) than I did in the previous 3 months. I have, however, eaten my weight in peanut m&m's. So you do the math while I go put on my fat pants.

Oh, there are all kinds of excuses I could make. I got sick at the beginning of April and didn't really get back to anything resembling normal for six weeks. Then we were nearing the end of school and had school musicals, spring football, ballet recitals, violin recitals, two ... count 'em TWO ... surprise parties that I was planning for the same day (Lord, help me!), and myriad other distractions. Then it was summer break. Only it didn't feel like a break for more than the first week.

But when we got to Maine, life slowed down a little. I started exercising again, and I started reading again. (In nine days: about 400 pages in Atlas Shrugged, and free Kindle samples of three books, plus the teeny-tiny aforementioned What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast.)

That last one was the kicker. Before April ... before I got sick and stopped sleeping and, therefore, stopped getting up at 5 a.m. ... I was accomplishing a good deal before I left to take the kids to school at 7:30. (Well, in all honesty, it was usually a tires-squeeling, "buckle yourself up before we hit the end of the street!" 7:40, but I digress.)

Getting sick knocked me for a loop and all of my good habits ... every last stinkin' one of them ... went out the window, replaced by whatever I needed to just get through the day.

But now I'm feeling good again and my brain is churning about all the things I need to do to get back in the swing of things. And it's all going to start with reclaiming my mornings.

Finish Well.