Day 8 - Made with love.

A hand-made present from your kid is always the best present you could receive. A pie made entirely from scratch, made for people you really want to enjoy it, always tastes better. A greeting card is more appreciated you spent the time to pick out the perfect one, and it shows.

What if you decided to hand-make your day from scratch, with love, and spend time picking out the perfect message you want to send yourself that day? What kind of day would that be?

What's stopping you?

Day 7 - Mistakes.

Since writing Day 6's (late) post earlier today, I've been thinking about the concept of "failure." In the School of Metaphysics, we learned -- and I'm totally paraphrasing here -- that there are no mistakes, only opportunities to learn. There is so much you can learn from the "mistakes" and "failures" in your life -- if you choose to.

I would be willing to bet that not one person out there hasn't had at least one big, huge learning experience in the form of what could otherwise be called a "mistake." A car accident that taught you to drive more carefully; unintentionally hurting someone's feelings which taught you to be more careful with your words; a close call with drinking or drugs that led you to make healthier choices for yourself; forgetting too many important appointments leading you to learning better calendaring skills.

The important factor in this is what you choose to do with it. You could choose to beat yourself up over hurting someone's feelings or forgetting too many appointments, or you could choose to learn from it and work to reduce those types of mistakes in the future.

The cool thing? You can even do this in retrospect. Do you have a mistake in your past that you're still holding a grudge about against yourself? Stop and look at it. Did you know it was a mistake when you were doing it? How has this mistake changed you as a person? If you hadn't made this mistake and learned from it, who might you be now without having learned that lesson?

Chances are, a lot of what's made you as awesome as you are today, was figuring out all the things that didn't make you feel so awesome before, and then working on it.

It occurs to me that this ties in with self-forgiveness... Topic for another day.

Day 6 (a day late) - Success is in how you see things.

Six days into November and I missed a day. I could look as this a couple of different ways:

1) I SUCK and I FAILED less than ONE WEEK IN and I should just GIVE UP now that I've failed because I can't even make it ONE WEEK so what's the point in doing this the rest of the month when I've already failed?!

or

2) I was spending time with my family yesterday and at the end of the day, I chose for my priority to be resting and spending time with my husband after a good, long day, rather than blanking out on the internet and forcing words onto a screen, just because.

I'm going with option two.

There is a difference between "failing" and choosing to spend your time and energy elsewhere.

Yesterday was a good day, complete with hand-made presents from the little guy, pizza with the in-laws at the request of the little guy, free fabric from my mother-in-law with lots of grand mental plans to make more tiered skirts, our bedroom and closet cleaned and reorganized, the little one's bedroom picked up and some toys reorganized... and? Apparently just moving around toys makes them all! brand! new! and exciting! so I had plastic eggs and pretend grape juice for dinner, after snacking on some plastic broccoli and a plastic banana.

There is nothing "fail" about yesterday.

Today I'll choose to make up for it and write twice :).

Day 5 - Relaxing.

Sometimes, the days where you do nothing productive but a load of laundry and spend the rest of the day leisurely relaxing, and it is a purposeful, "I deserve this" sort of relaxing, that is just as good a day as the days when you check a dozen things off your to-do list.

Today is one of those days.

What do you do on your "screw it, I'm doing nothing!" days? (Other than... nothing.) Reading? Writing? Are you huddled on the couch with a blanket? In the recliner with the cats? I want to hear all about your chill-time.

Day 3 - A little creativity.

A couple of weeks ago, the four-year-old informed me that he doesn't have a scarf. This statement was followed by, "You need to make me one." Oh, how I love that my child knows that things can be made and not only bought, and oh, how I love that he is still young enough to think it's cool to wear things I make him :).

I let him pick through my yarn stash and he chose, I wasn't surprised, lime green. The word "green" can't even be said by itself in our house right now; it's "green-my-favorite-color." But he needs choices, so I give him choices, even if I'm 99% sure what he will choose. And of course, he chose green.

I started working with a basket-weaving type stitch I found in the book I bought myself a few months ago, 99 Crochet Post Stitches, and while it looked just fine, it also just looked... fine. Not neat. Not something neat enough for a four-year-old.

So, about fourteen or so inches into the fine-but-plain scarf, I ripped it all out, and found something better.

The pattern I found for a snake scarf was a great start, though I was still pretty intent on learning a new stitch in the process, too, and that one's still mostly just single crochet. So, back to the book, I found a few stitches that I thought could look snake-scaley and, again with my son needing choices, let him choose which he thought looked the snakiest.

A couple of modifications later (because, you know, trying to meld two patterns you've never done before into one final product doesn't always go exactly right the first time) and a lot of crocheting a little bit at a time over the course of, oh, I don't know, I have no concept of time, a week or two maybe?, we have a snake scarf -- just in time for cold weather!

How have you been expressing some creativity lately? What creative endeavors do you like learning more about? What's one thing you can do to expand your creative horizons?

Day 2 - Improvement through being fine where you are.

Something has me thinking.

I saw a post on facebook the other day that suggested the idea of self-love and self-acceptance rather than self-help and/or self-improvement. For a second, I loved the idea -- accepting yourself for who you are, right now, sounds like a great idea! But then I started wondering...

Okay, so what if "self-acceptance" were the idea of accepting you, as you truly are, on the inside, and letting that shine? Wouldn't that be different than loving the "you" that shows up with all the masks you put on and barriers you put around yourself, to keep the rest of the world from seeing who you truly are? If we were to love and accept ourselves with all our masks and barriers, would that hold us back from being more of who we really are?

Couldn't part of "self-acceptance" be accepting who you are on the inside and then wanting to use self-help/self-improvement tools to shed the masks and kick down the walls?

So now I'm thinking, self-improvement and self-acceptance can go hand in hand, and possibly even be the same thing. Do you think? Or does it depend on motive? Do you want to "self-improve" for yourself? For your spouse? For your kids? For your boss? If you accept yourself for who you are now, with all the masks and barriers, does that then help them to shed more naturally, as you no longer feel the need to protect yourself with them?

How does that work?

What if you love and accept yourself so much that you want to be an even better you?

Maybe the facebook post had the right idea... what if self-acceptance is the key, and with that, all the "improvements" start happening more easily and more naturally?

So... what do you love about yourself, that could help you be an even better you by embracing it?

Day 1 - "I love you enough..."

My son is going through an argumentative phase. This phase started when he was pretty small and I get the odd feeling it will continue the rest of his life, so maybe "phase" isn't the right word, and maybe "argumentative" isn't, either. My son just has to push boundaries, to see what he can get to happen his way, and what will happen in response if the answer is that he can't. He likes to have things on his terms (who doesn't?) and is very vocal about it when he's unhappy about the way something is going.

On the flip side, he's also very vocal when he is happy. Pretty much, the kid is just very vocal. And I think the boundary-pushing that frustrates us, as his parents, while he is four, will be a fabulous trait when he is older.

The past few days I've been experimenting with some new wording when I am setting boundaries that he's not happy with. Instead of arguing or explaining or reminding him that "we're working on listening the first time right now, remember?" or what have you, what I've started doing is giving him a hug and saying, "I love you enough to teach you about boundaries," or, "I love you enough to teach you to be a responsible person and make good choices." In this way, instead of one of us "winning" an argument, it's a reminder (to both of us) that I'm doing what I am because I love him and want him to learn good habits.

I got to thinking this morning about how I could apply this concept to myself. I tend to have internal arguments with myself, and to rebel against the "rules" I put in place for myself to follow. Simply put, I don't like have-to's, even if they're my have-to's. I give myself lots of choices. But still I catch myself losing momentum (or not even being able to get momentum in the first place) on things that I would really like for myself to learn. So I wondered, what if I were to change the wording with myself? Instead of telling myself I "have to" do something or that it would be "good for me" to learn to be more responsible with this or that, what if I told myself, "I love you enough to teach you to be a responsible person and make good choices?" If I came at my list of have-to's and ought-to's and keep-intending-to's from a position of love thyself, how much better might those healthy decisions feel?

What about you -- how do you talk to yourself about your I-really-ought-to's? How effective is it, and what might make it feel better?