Exhale

Wasn't Exhale the name of a really bad movie I never saw? In any case, I feel like I'm breathing out for the first time in, oh, almost a year?

Today was the culmination of a few months of especially intense stress and I feel particularly crazy today, but I think it might do me well to just list what has been going on with us during the last 12 months to remind myself that my life is not always like this and there is an actual reason (quite a few, in fact!) that I'm feeling this way.

Since last spring, we:

• Bought a new house (after a long drawn-out process of loan underwriting, figuring out whether we could legally rent our old one, etc.)
• Got two places (our old house and our new basement apartment) ready to rent and found renters
• Immediately started teaching a class at BYU in addition to my normal full-time job. We weren't even done moving in yet (let's be honest--still aren't)
• Painted a couple of rooms of our house and some of the gazebo in the backyard
• Josh left on (more) trips to Alaska. When he was home, he was editing like mad
• Josh started doing some corporate work on top of Alaska stuff
• We went through tax insanity
• Josh became involved in a yet-to-be-disclosed third project on top of Alaska doc and corporate work--a project that requires even more travel, more editing, and insane deadlines. Basically, Josh hasn't had a normal week of sleep in literally three months now.
• I applied for and was offered a new job, which after wrenching deliberation, I turned down. I pressed to expand my role at my current job. 
• I did Easter and Zoe's birthday on my own.
• I threw a peacock party for Zoe for lots of little kids (funny how this one is obviously smaller than pretty much everything else on the list, but was psychologically overwhelming because Josh was out of town during the planning and execution of it and I'm used to his help).

As I look at this list, it actually doesn't look as bad as it has felt, but I have to remind myself that it takes everything I have in me just to fit a normal day of full-time work and kid raising into 24 hours. Like I'm doing extremely well if I can do the dishes the day they were dirtied and get a 30 minute run in. Add anything else to the schedule and it's, well, crisis mode.

Knock on wood, but I think crisis mode is over for now. And I'm really, really looking forward to lying by a pool somewhere, to eating leisurely breakfasts and dinners in the gazebo, to having people over for low-key dinners, to, I don't know, have time to talk to my husband, to getting all the way unpacked and organized--and actually tackling some of the house projects that call out to me at every turn--and to just hanging out with my kids and soaking up their too quickly progressing childhoods. 

And I'm determined to figure out how to stay out of crisis mode for longer. I know we need to say "no" more, but figuring out the particulars of what that means is tricky. But so worth it.