July was so good to me

I felt so motivated and inspired and was really proud of myself and the progress I was making in my life. I was decluttering and asking for help. When I got to a pausing point with the decluttering process (admittedly a bad decision), I switched gears and started working out to declutter my body. I was going to Pennsic with Charlie the first week of August and a friend/camp mate had agreed to get up with me every morning to walk roughly 2 miles upon my request. I needed to get to where I could do 2 miles. So I started with a mile a day for a week and a half and kicked up to 2 miles for about a week or so before Pennsic. With my friend's willingness to walk with me, I was able to get up everyday at 6:30 in the cold and walk when all I wanted to do was sleep in (it was my vacation without the kids afterall). But I was motivated and committed and so proud of myself.

I had a doctor's appointment the Tuesday after we got back and I, of course, had a weigh in. In 3-4 weeks, I had lost only 1/2 a pound. I was discouraged and pissed and freaking exhausted. I know it takes time for you body to adjust before exercising gives you energy but after 3 weeks of a lifestyle change, I was still more fatigued than normal. My health issues already leave me fatigued all day every day and all the doctors keep saying is I need to lose weight. But the fact that I can only work out for a few days in a row before I absolutely need to take a day off or I'm falling asleep at work is a problem.

I also gave myself permission to stop decluttering because I was waiting on my friend to be ready to take a lot of our baby stuff off our hands. The fact is, I'm not ready to give up on the baby phase of life and am only doing it because we are not in a place in our lives for another child and we desperately need the space for stuff we actually use. Charlie says that if we decide to have another baby, we'll just re-stock up, because if we can afford a third child, we can afford the stuff that goes with a child. I feel like that's a really awful waste of money when we already have what we need. Part of the reason I'm so set on this stuff going to my friend is because there's the possibility it can come back. I'm really struggling with letting go of the baby stuff. I have a lot more unresolved issues around this than I thought.

So, in the mean time, I need to refocus on decluttering non-baby stuff. This weekend I choose to go through clothes Rachel will be growing into next year (no emotional attachments yet) and organize that into winter and summer clothes for convenience. I also tackled the magazines. In one bookcase, I had about 50 magazines, maybe more, that I've been slowly whittling down. As of this morning, I was down to 38. I'm flipping through them, some of them finally reading 2-3 years later, keeping the articles and images that inspire me in some way and recycling the rest. I'm now done to 18 and 1/2 left to go through. It doesn't feel like a lot of progress made because it's so much work for so little gain, but the mental gain of knowing I've released the magazine clutter is already immense.

My goal, so as not to overwhelm myself, has been to do this process using baby steps. I think ultimately this is helping keep me from burning out of decluttering, but really, there has been so little visible progress so far, I'm overwhelmed with the amount still left. I think I might actually benefit from a set weekend dedicated to deep decluttering. My biggest problem is getting it out of the house. It's not convenience in any way to drop this stuff off at a thrift store. And I've been known to skip something that's outside my normal routine (like picking up my prescriptions) even if it is convenient just because I want to get home and get home now. Let's face it, I'm a girl of routine and hate rush hour traffic (and dropping stuff off at the thrift store means facing rush hour traffic). The other problem is saving stuff for the possible yard sale. I kept saving stuff then said screw it, it's worth more to me to get it out of my house than to make 50 bucks. But then it didn't get out of my house and now a yard sale date has been set. I'm frustrated that I have to keep it in my house another 2 months before the yard sale happens but honestly, it probably would have anyway and then I just would have been mad at myself for failing to thrift it.

So we're back to baby steps. Yes it's slow, yes it's frustrating, but it's the pace that works for my health, for my family, and for my lifestyle so we're sticking with it.