Comedy Through The Chaos

Hello, friends, and happy Thursday to everybody out there in the Cadresphere. We'll just chat to ourselves for a while. If you wonder who the lady wearing the unicorn shirt is, I am Miss Shannon Paul. I am a comedian and corporate speaker and voice actor and a Van Mc and a variety of other things. If you go to my LinkedIn page, who hubs out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I am here to talk to you on this caregiver Thursday because I'm also the mom of an adorable 16 year old boy who just happens to also, also be on the autism spectrum.

So I'm happy to join you as I come in the anchor leg of our caregiver Thursdays. Hello, Mel Myers. Thanks for joining us today. I'm looking at myself in the screen and it'll kind of lead into what I'm talking about. Hello, speak wonder. Speak wonder. Before I get into what I'm talking about today. And hello, H. Dayton. Speak wonder. I'm excited to look back in your replay because I saw this morning that you were going to do some of your poetry, I believe. So I'm excited to go and see that in speak wonder's replay.

So sorry that I was not able to, to join you live. So I'm sitting here. Cause we are at the home stretch of summer break. And when I was going through my gratitude practice, what I wondered this year is that. Hello, Steph Erwin. What I realized this year is that this summer for us went really fast. And I say that in a good way because of a variety of challenges that my kiddo and I have together. Summers don't always go fast. Like, usually by this time I'm like, when does he go back? And I need his team and what are we gonna do?

But we've had for us a very content summer. And so which leads me to why I'm so shiny right now. We did actually, today, because I've been working on. Because he's a teenager who doesn't know that skincare is important. So I've been working on, hey, you should wash your face. And you gotta do this little skincare routine because he has his little scruffy shaggy from Scooby Doo beard that comes out there all the time, and I don't want him looking scruffy. So we did our facial cleansing and then used this face oil that made me look incredibly shiny.

So shout out to hydration, because that's what you have to do sometimes. It's for a good reason, and I think it's good for his face. So that's good. We'll do it. But when you're thinking about whether it's good that the passage of time is going really fast or whether it's good that things seem to be slowing down, I just like to think about it from the perspective of one of my favorite meditations, where we talk about the concept of impression permanence, and how wherever you are right now is hopefully where you're supposed to be and trying to be content in the moments that you're in.

So. Hello, Jules. And so that just made me think about one of the hobbies that we took up this summer. And so we took up a garden, and we've been doing some gardening. And so I planted, of all things, some potatoes. And that was my attempt to, every once in a while, I go through and I go, hey, we should eat potatoes, even though neither of us eat potatoes at volume. So I always end up with all these leftover potatoes. And I had these potatoes that I let sit around for so long. Oh, thank you. Shiny and vibrant.

I like the reframing from speak wonder. So I had these potatoes that had sat around long enough that they had started to grow little sprouts and little eyes, because I kept going, well, maybe I'm gonna brush those off and actually bake them. Which clearly was not going to happen. You know, I live in the midwest, but I'm not organically a potato person. So I decided that I was going to plant these potatoes instead, and we would turn it into our little gardening adventure, because we planted a bunch of other stuff, my kiddo and I, just to do it.

So I looked up how to do them, chopped them up, just right planted them. And if I take you to our backyard garden, there's actually plants that grew from the potatoes, so that we're very proud of. But now, because this is something we've never done before, since all of the exciting stuff happens below the ground, now I'm at this going, when do I see if it's done? You know, when do we know if all of the roots have had a chance to do what they're supposed to do and actually branch out and become tubers and turn into actual potatoes?

When do I know that it's done? So I've looked at a couple of different websites, and they told me, kind of, you know, this many days do this when the leaves start to turn yellow, maybe dig them up a little bit and see what it's like. But it just reminds me that, you know, I'm enjoying what's above ground, and I don't even know what amazing thing might actually be below ground. And that's a whole other thing that we get to experience and go, hey, we left them in there long enough, or maybe we took them out too early, or I need to put them back in, because I dug the hole and saw that maybe they weren't quite ready, but it's something else to look forward to, along with the process of us even planting them and then seeing them start to grow.

So each of these steps has been really interesting for my kiddo and I. More me. He's just like, I would have sit here on my phone, but mom said, no, get up. Let's go in the backyard. But once we get out there, he's interested. And so that's the thing with a lot of the processes in our life, is that we're just gonna see how they get, how they end up at the end, and then hopefully appreciate each of the little steps along the way. Then take those, hey, I'm not sure how this is gonna turn out, but this part's kind of cool.

So let's see how this goes. If they're not actually turned into actual potatoes that I get to eventually boil or mash or fry or any of those things, I'm cool, because, hey, it didn't hurt us any, and we got to learn something in the process. And maybe, you know, we'll try again next year, we'll grow some more potatoes. But in the meantime, it was something that we could go. This is a mini achievement that we're kind of proud of, something cool that we managed to do, because I could have just thrown them in the compost bin and not tried at all.

So to bring you around, hopefully there's something in your life that you were going, hey, I'm going to give it a shot, because I didn't know how it was gonna turn out. You know, I didn't give it a shot because I've never done it before, and so it's probably not gonna turn out the way it's supposed to, or I've never done it before, and it's not gonna be perfect, or it's not gonna be as good as somebody else who might be an expert in that. And is that holding you back from trying something? If it is, I say dive in.

That's the whole learning process, is that we can't expect to be perfect at everything that we do. I can't expect that every time I come onto this live stream, there's going to be every hair in place, and I'm not going to feel like I look really shiny and I look like I just came in from a run, but every time I do it, I can go, here's one more thing that I said that hopefully resonated with you, and then that can just eventually snowball. And that's what we hope that we do here in the Cadre sphere.

I'm gonna take you over here and see if he wants to say hello. Do you wanna say hello to mom's friends? You wanna say hi? You wanna say hi? Hi. Oh, that was pretty good. You got acknowledged by the 16 year old. Well done, everybody in the cadres fair. That's the win for today. So whatever your wins are, thank you, steph. Whatever your wins are for the day, whatever your first next right thing is for today, you're crushing it. Absolutely crushing it. And there are lots of us here in the Cadre sphere that want to applaud whatever your next first right step is for you in your journey right now.

And that's why we have so many different contributors coming at this from so many different angles. So if you need somebody, pop in at any given time, if you need one of us, go ahead and let us know what you have going on in the chat, and we will do our best to try and accommodate and support and amplify whatever it is that you need. Because, hey, it's a big world and there are lots of complex things that are going on right now. And if anything, we need each other even more than ever. Come here.

Mom's gonna say bye. Come here. So you say bye. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll see you again next week.