For a long time, my solution to overwhelm was a brain dump.
I needed to get that stress-tornado out of my head and on to paper so that I could create a plan of attack.
Just the process was helpful, but it was hard to know where to start fixing.
Usually, by the time I need to do a brain dump, I am in pretty deep and think I need to fix it all at once.
And that doesn’t work. (Trust me.)
A while back, I was feeling very brain-dumpy about school. I was worried that we weren’t doing enough.
(Enough is a real stinker. When you get really wrapped up in Enough, it makes you feel like you’ve had too much caffeine and not enough deep-breathing.)
And so as I thought about what would really feel like Enough, I decided maybe it was a good idea to pick up my copy of Essentialism, and this time read it specifically as a homeschool mom.
Reading Essentialism is an antidote for that yucky Enough feeling. So are all the things my friend Melissa writes.
(Melissa makes you feel like you’ve been breathing with monks and drinking nothing but herbal tea and fresh spring water.)
Asking myself WWMelissaD, I recalled a post of her’s from a while back about her 3 thing to-do list, and I started to feel a little idea forming – was it possible to homeschool for the rest of the year and only do three things?
Would I be neglecting my kids’ needs if I did so?
Would this plan make me feel worse?
It turns out, that the answer is no. It made me feel so much better.
For the past few months, we have been focusing on 3 things in our homeschool: math, reading aloud, and games.
That doesn’t mean that that’s all we’ve been doing. Instead, those became the things we made sure to do every day. (Because there were only 3 things, that part became easy!)
And anything else was a bonus.
To keep track of all of it, I marked it all down each day AFTER THE FACT in my bullet journal, and let me tell you – those lists were packed with good stuff.
But on the hard days? The sick days? The gloomy days? The Ladies Holiday days? The three things made me feel like we had done enough.
The guilt and worry fell away. They were beaten out by a feeling of accomplishment; a warm, fuzzy blanket of reassurance.
And slowly, I started adding back other things.
Because doing just enough gave me some energy back, some time to think, and a much-needed deep breath.
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