Comedy Through The Chaos

Hello and happy Thursday Cadre friends here in the Cadre sphere. I hope that you are all doing well wherever you are. I am Ms. Shannon. I'm going to go ahead and hydrate while we wait for people to catch up into our 2pm Central comedy through the Chaos live stream they have here. Hopefully you are doing well wherever you are. Hello, Dr. Teresa. Hello. I just want to tell you I appreciate everything that you do and I also believe that you are a champion because a lot of your live streams are earlier than I have my mental capacity to get my act together.

Carlette, thank you very much for joining us. Hello. Thank you. As people continue to join us and wherever you are, since it is winter everywhere, I encourage you to hydrate whatever that is. This happens to be chia seed water. So if you see me drinking aggressively, that is why, because probably one of the robust chia seeds has gotten hydrated appropriately that it doesn't want to fit in my straw. Right. So. Hello, hello, hello everybody. Welcome to this Thursday edition of Comedy through the chaos.

I am Ms. Shannon. A variety of word related things here. I'm a comedian, I'm a corporate speaker, I'm a voice actor and author and I hub out of the great state of Minnesota. I also happen to be the proud mother of awesome 16 year old kiddo who happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum. So I speak often from the perspective of a caregiver from that particular perspective. And hopefully what we end up doing here on Thursday is giving you some time to refuel yourself as a caregiver, as a human being, as in all things that might be caretaking for someone in your situation, in your life, somebody that you care about or sometimes it's just caregiving for ourselves because we often don't do that enough.

What I thought I'd talk about today is, as I said, I am hubbing out of the great state of Minnesota and I would love if anybody that's joining us right now, I know it has been an unseasonably cold for a lot of people where you are at. So if you're in one of our other locales, I mean we're, we're expecting winter here in Minnesota. If you're in one of those places that your winters have even been more aggressively wintry, feel free to go ahead and tap that screen or let me know where you're at because I have some friends that have been in the Houston area and it sounds like it was a beast.

I have some friends in Louisiana that are getting weather that I'm all like, okay, I get it. I understand. I have some friends. I used to live in Austin, Texas. They were telling me what's going on there. So I totally get it. Why? We had very unexpected snow days in a lot of places across the country. And I give you great credit if you are in one of those locales and you had to deal with having your kids home because the schools were closed because of the weather. Because that's something that I think that we are a little bit more accustomed to here in Minnesota.

Like, well, okay, snow day. Got it. Got to figure it out. We didn't have snow days earlier this week, but my son already had a short week. But we ended up closing the schools on Tuesday because of extreme cold here in Minneapolis, which is the area that I live in right now. So it was so cold that they said, just keep your kid home. And I have gotten better at snow days and cold days than I was the first few times that it happened. So here's what we ended up doing. And I want to use this as an example of something that I don't think that we often give ourselves enough credit for as caregivers.

So Tuesday, you know, we got the note, got the text messages and everything. Late on Monday night, hey, no school. Keep your kid. So on Tuesday, I'm, of course, trying to find things to keep him occupied, because I know a lot of teenagers would just occupy themselves. That doesn't happen to be our situation. Like, the more occupied he is, appropriately, the better things go in our household. So I'm like, okay, what do I have? So I thought about this for a while. We had been on a subscription for a thing called tinker crates.

I brought an example upstairs. What they are, they're these cool things that you could get each of them that says labyrinth, because I know things are backwards. And so we were on this monthly subscription where these would come to the house, they have a different project in them, and for a while, we were crushing them. Loved it. My kid would sit down with me. We would go ahead and put them out. If you follow me on social media, maybe you've seen us put them together. But as our kids are want to do, he fell off of it like it was.

It was just a struggle and a tug of war to get him to sit down and do these tinker creates with me. And like any other subscription, it took a while for me to go, okay, I need to put this on pause and stop collecting these tinker crates. But like a lot of you caregivers out there, what Did I do? Of course, I didn't just toss them out. I threw them under the bed, put them under the bed. His bed, to be specific. They're down there with the aggressive dust bunnies that live in kids rooms. So I put them under the bed and they've been under the bed and thank goodness I remembered on Tuesday.

Wait a minute, you have those tinker crates. You have something in your toolkit to get you through today because you planned for this and forgot that you planned for it. So what we did on Tuesday, as you put this together, it is a flip car. You can see that it's already been used to the point I had him write his name on it, that one of the balloons that went on this wheel has already been taken off. But in general, it does what the flip car is supposed to do still. So that's all good. I kind of feel like that was extra work anyway to try and put these balloons on.

But whatever, they look cool. So that's what we did on Tuesday and managed to put that together. And it has been long enough since the last time time we tried one of these that I was not sure if he was going to sit down and do this with me, but it actually worked out really, really well. We probably had enough of a break that like so many things in our life, all things old are new again. So instead of it feeling like work, it was a fun project again for us to be able to do it. And I was really excited with the fact that I'm like, okay, cool, we did get to do something.

And it wasn't just you sitting here on Tuesday being appropriately emo y teenager at me, as he has a tendency to adorably do. And I bring that up as an example of the imposter syndrome that we have as caregivers, where no matter what we're doing, a lot of times we go, we're not doing enough, we're not doing it right. We should be doing it better. When the answer is there are some things that we have in our toolkit and the ability to pivot and things that we do on a regular basis that we forget to give ourselves credit for.

And maybe there's some things that you have in the dusty, dusty parts of what is your version of under your kid's bed that when you need those resources, you could go to them. So every once in a while, I encourage you to go ahead and push a couple of dust bunnies out of the way and see what is back there that you can use as a resource. If you're in the moments of an impasse as a caregiver. Sometimes it's like, oh, wait, this is something that worked for us before. And then because of repetition, because of habit, because of a variety of things, maybe you needed to put it on pause for a little while.

And then when you're in one of these situations, maybe now is the time to go back to one of those things and just dust it off and it might work for you again right now, instead of continually trying to find whatever the new hotness is as a caregiver, there are lots of times that it's, okay, I need to put this on pause, but that doesn't mean that it's not a good strategy, it's not a good skill set, it's not something that's working. It's just not what we need at the moment. But then maybe in six months, in nine months, in a year, in two years, maybe this will be something that'll be useful for you again.

So to remind yourself that all of the skill sets that you have as you continue your journey as a caregiver, all of that stuff all comes back into play in making you an expert in caring for and loving the person that you are caring for, and also caring for yourself and giving yourself credit for all of the things that you've learned, all of the things that you've forgotten that you learned, and just going, all right, here's the time that that thing is going to come into play again, so please do that.

Dust bunnies can get bigger than we think they can. They could turn into snowball sized dust bunnies that might be just getting in the way of something that you can need. If you want to go ahead and make a pivot, if you want to figure out how to get through a tough time that you have going on in your life, sometimes just revisit some of the things that have been pushed away and put into a corner. So that is what I want to encourage you for this week. If there is something that we could continue to share with you throughout the week, throughout the journey here in the Cadre sphere, please let us know.

You can always go ahead and drop us a line in the chat. You can always send us a message in our communities. If you're like, hey, I really appreciate what you talked about here that resonated with me. Do more of that. That's cool. You want to mess with me, say, hey, do less of that. That's cool. I appreciate your constructive criticism. If you go, hey, I absolutely could relate, I would Love to hear from you as well. Let me know throughout the week. I think what I'm going to talk about next week is how we can not squash our own joy and not let the people in our circle squash our joy and we'll see how that goes.

I think I have a very relatable experience of what happens to us. In the meantime, please take care of yourselves. Please figure out your variety of how you could keep yourself refueled, replenished, find joy in your life. If you need to find some laughs throughout the week, hey, you can always ping us and let us know how we could continue to support all of you. So hello. Hello md thank you for joining us. I was just talking about how I had to go and find some old ways to get through the week because we had an inadvertent school closure here in the Twin Cities.

So maybe wherever you are, you're having that same kind of situations and just reminding people that sometimes you have things in your personal toolkit, you have things that you can use if you need to make a pivot that you forgot that you even had those resources. So I encourage you to kind of go through your personal list sometimes, look into those corners and see what else you have. So wherever you are, friends and colleagues and new friends here in the Cadre sphere, let us know how we could continue to support you.

As you can see, there's a variety of contributors that are here in the Cadre sphere that are speaking on a variety of topics. Hopefully one that resonates with you. So let us know you know what it is that you have going on. So md, just so you don't have to look through the whole replay, you can figure out this is what we made here in my house, my kiddo and I. So if you want to know how this came into play, you can watch the rest of it in the replay. So I'm gonna finish up some stuff and then go.

You are my last adulting thing that I do before I go pick up my kiddo at school. So I appreciate all of you. Thanks for joining us. I will be back here again next Thursday at 2pm Central. I always try to make sure that I at least put a note if I have to move something around either for a work related thing or a school related thing with my kiddo, I always let you know if I'm moving it and so hopefully this time works for you. I picked it kind of arbitrary based upon the schedule I have with my son.

But if you're like, hey, you need to move it up or you need to move it back, let me know and I will do my best to accommodate. So everybody stay your variety of warm if wherever you are is out wintering right now and I will see everybody next week.