Reserving Your Time To Refuel

Hello, friends. Happy Thursday to you. If you're watching us on a Thursday or on our caregiver Thursday, I am miss Shannon as we wait for some people to join us. Hello. Hello. Thank you for joining us. I should put my glasses on so I can actually thank you appropriately for joining the chat. We'll see if that helps. New phyla. Oh, hi, sue. Thanks for joining us. I'm playing with some legos here. I am normally joining this live stream from my home studio, but I am working today at a conference. It's for the national co op grocer.

So I'm at a, I'm in a conference room. My friend from ICOM's over there trying to work, so I know you're busy. So I'm talking and he's trying to break down so they can leave after the show today. So we're over in lovely Eagan, Minnesota, and I am going to play with some legos and talk to you today on our caregiver Thursday. About today, I said I was going to talk about reserving your right to refuel and what that looks like. So we'll get to that in a little bit. I really appreciate the color scheme that they did with these legos.

So hopefully everyone has been having a good week so far. If you have not had a chance to take a break for yourself, hopefully this is part of that. Hopefully you're giving this as an opportunity to kind of just go, maybe I just need a chance to take a deep breath. Maybe I just need a chance to give myself a nice hug. Maybe I just need to have community with someone and maybe just be. Have a conversation with my friend, Miss Shannon. So we are doing that right now. When I was deciding what to talk about for this week, what are the reasons why I thought that talking about reserving the right or the time to refuel would be appropriate is because today, not only is caregiver Thursday, today is my birthday.

And so people have been asking me, hey, so one, people have been saying happy birthday, which I appreciate, but people have been asking me, what am I doing on my birthday? And what I've been doing on my birthday is, one, working at this conference, and two, I have a show tonight. So people seem to think that it's really surprising that I am not doing, as they put it, adulting time. And I didn't throw a party for myself, and I just kinda am not that person and haven't and didn't really even know where to put that time and what that would look like as far as I'm concerned.

The fact that I was doing two things that I love to do today, even though it's my birthday, seemed to count. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm doing two things that I like, so that counts as a good thing for my birthday. So I'm not. I don't expect anybody to feel sorry for me. But it did make me think about this. And as I've mentioned before, I'm very fortunate that the person who primarily helps me out with my son is my sister, Casey. And she is the sweetest human being and is a wonderful PCA for my son.

And the thing that I realized is that I often ask her to help me out and to watch him when I'm working. And I understand when I do that, but what I don't do is ask her to go, hey, would you mind watching him for a while? When I'm going to go to the movies or go to the gym or take a nap or go for a walk or anything, that might be something. That was what you put in the category of for me, and I understand why I don't do that and how it feels really selfish. And in that category of, well, I don't want to use up that time.

That's time that I should be spending with him. I should save that time up for something that's important. And I definitely think using that time for when I'm working is important. I also don't want to be a burden and use up that time for something that seems unnecessary, you know? And isn't it easy for us to fall into that category of thinking that spending time on something that we want to do or something that's like a walk or an extended shower or, you know, maybe just spending time cleaning up without somebody else making a mess at the same time that you're cleaning something like that, it seems like it's a waste of time or it's selfish or it's a luxury, or it's something like that.

To start breaking that habit, I really had to change my mindset about the way that I viewed that time. That time that I. I needed in order to refuel myself so that I could continue to care for my son, who I love and is, who is the most important thing in my life. So it required me to go. It isn't selfish to ask my sister to occasionally watch him because I wanted to go see my friends perform in a show. And it wasn't selfish to ask her to watch him because I had something I really needed to get done.

So that I had time to take care of some things in the house that I couldn't do and take care of him at the same time. And in order to do that and not feel guilty, I needed to say no to some other things. Which goes back to some conversations we had before. And how what some of our other practitioners and content sharers here in Kadri have said before about being able to use your know appropriately so you can say yes to other things in your life. So it helped me be very intentional about some of the other things that I was saying yes to.

Girl, if I was saying yes to that, it meant that I wasn't leaving room for these other things that I needed in order to sustain myself. In order to sustain the energy that I need in order to not only do my job efficiently, but to be able to make wise choices as I continue to care for my son. To be able to laugh off when he's being a grumpy 16 year old. To be able to carry one more load of his gross clothes downstairs to do his laundry. And if I'm not leaving myself enough time and enough energy to do that, then what I'm really doing is being a detriment to us both.

If I'm not leaving myself enough time to refuel that particular bucket, then I'm not doing either of us a favor. You know, I'm not being a soldier. I'm not. I'm. You know, that badge of honor that we give ourselves because we work ourselves to a frenzy or into a flurry or until we're just so exhausted that we can't take another step. It doesn't serve us. So we do need to give ourselves time to refuel when we can. Because there are some times when we are in a corner and we can't. I'm changing it a little bit over here.

There are times when we can't. Because there's going to be times when we don't have support, when we don't have our backup. When something happens or somebody calls in sick and we can't call in. Maybe there's a time where my sister can't come and help me out. So just like when those situations arise, I'm sure that those arise for you, too. And so it's okay to go, no. While I'm able, I'm going to take this time and do something that I want that will refuel me. So that I have the opportunity to be better at the things that I do for the person and people that I care for.

I can think of three or four things that I did this week that when I look back and I give myself time to go, hey, good job, mom. Good job. Which I honestly do not do often enough. Hopefully, you do it more often than I do, but every once in a while, I'm like, hey, good job, mom. You did a good job on that one that I wouldn't have been able to do if I had allowed myself to get depleted. And there's been lots of times, lots of times throughout the years where I let myself get too tired and was not able to make the best choices or the next right thing.

So trying to do better each day to do that less often to catch myself before I get to the point that I'm completely depleted to catch myself when I can see that those water levels are starting to dip, so that I can start to fill them back up, so I can try and, like, make sure that I find a way to fill them back up before I get to a point that I don't get to the point that they're in a drought. Because once you get to that point, it's really hard to fill that bucket back up if you let it get to the point that it's dry.

So I encourage you to do that if you can just spend a little bit more time giving yourself the opportunity to go, oh, wait. Amen. I see it's starting to dip. It's starting to dip. Let me go ahead. I'm just gonna start filling it back up now. In fact, not only am I gonna fill it up, I'm gonna fill it up with that good water. I'm gonna put that filtered water in it. I'm gonna go get myself one of those fancy, the fancy filters that put in it, maybe. You know what? I just saw this on Amazon. You can get that filter that has, like, the charcoal in it and it looks like a fish.

Put that in your bucket, let that bob around so that you can see it every once in a while so it can take all of the growth stuff out of your water, put some whimsy in your bucket, use that to refuel yourself, and then hopefully, we won't end up all, like, dehydrated and drinking all the gunk that's on the bottom of it. So I'm gonna get back to work. We are gonna see you again next week as we continue to talk about how we as caregivers can stay in this adventure together, how we can support one another.

And if you're having a rough week, there's so much content here in the Cadre app. Normally, I have more opportunity to check in with my friend Shannon, and I saw a little piece that I don't know what my friend Colleen sat in this morning, but I'm gonna find that out. I'm gonna listen to the rest of her livestream from earlier this morning and check in with them. But there's always somebody here that you can listen to, that you can have community with, and that you can sit there and go, wait. I'm not alone in this adventure.

So if you need somebody, there's somebody here for you. So take a deep breath and we'll see you next week.