Gross Things Parents Do

In my family it isn't just me. Both parents of children have almost equal gross-factor. Here's the list. I have done at least 5, regularly.

10 Gross Things Parents Do!

Under Pressure ...

Wow. The interim of 'no blogging' has been eventful.  I've been managing ongoing work stress, dealing with ill husband, all the other changes since the end of the Bruce tour holiday in February and on top of all that, some pretty serious issues with Dad's nursing home, and his hospitalisation on Monday.

So one of the nasty side effects of all this stress has been panic attacks. I haven't had any of those in such a long time.  Until the last few weeks. During one incident of being frozen by fears, one thing I have learnt is that I just need a focus to remove myself from the crippling moments of indecision - generally that is something I find through getting another person's input, however the concept of a focus is something I can work on, I know I love the lyrics to The Rising, or I can choose to focus on a simple, trivial decision to remove the stress a little.  If all else fails I need to remember to break any troubles down into one small decision at a time.

What else is putting me under pressure? All the usual things, plus extras in caring for my family, including Dad. How am I dealing with it? One day at a time, one action at a time.

What I need to urgently do is bend my life to re-include time for walking. How I'll manage that when my 3 children all feel they don't get enough of me already between work, tai chi and Dad I don't quite know. Having remembered to continue typing this blog is step one!

One a lighter note, "under Pressure' to also buy Queen tickets, or Eagles tickets... or neither!

Why I wish I hadn't done Bruce in Brisbane

I've reached a certain point now, where at this very moment, I simply wish I had not attended the Brisbane concert at all. Would I be jealous of those who had? Probably yes, especially as almost all the people I know raved about it. However the concert they experienced, was not the same one I attended. For me, the Brisbane concert was the one that quite simply, went wrong. It summed up all that was crappy and shit on the tour of Australia, and did nothing at all to uplift me as every other Springsteen concert has done. 

My reasons why are:

1. Poor queue preparation / outcomes / moods
I really don't think I have the mindset required to enjoy queuing. I hate waiting for one thing. I also hate wasting time, and tension. Queues are filled with all of that and more.  But the Brisbane queue was especially crap, as one of my friends arrived first, then told other people, then they said 'just go home till tomorrow' and then the 2nd group of people turned up, apparently took over number 1&2 spot from 2 other people and then eventually because I was parked in my car with nothing else to do for the afternoon I ended up getting number 9 & 10 spot with my daughter. This soon turned into 7 & 8 when two people dropped out. This should have made us happy, but because of the tension (I assume from the above confusion between everyone with a higher number than us) it just made me uncomfortable. I was alone with my girl with a very good number but with no immediate prospect of being near any friendly faces who would assist me in ensuring my girl's safety in the pit.  I didn't really want to have such low numbers with her, without also having along another adult beside us who was as committed to safety as I was.  This tension stayed with me for the 3 days of queuing. 

2. My beautiful daughter. 
Who convinced me to do just one more show.  I do not regret taking her, not a bit, but there were many moments when I questioned my decisions & hers.  We had a pact that because she was going to be at the front, no sooking or getting tired (she had managed 2 concerts already in fine form so I didn't foresee how this could happen!) What I didn't think ahead to was what I would do if she couldn't keep her side of the bargain (nobody is perfect!) I should have had a plan B!!!! So what went wrong?  Quite a bit. Because we now had tour shirts post-Sydney, and the ladies in the Brisvegas Bruce house were dressing up, she wanted to join into that fun. Great, except that her previous concert attire was far more suited to long hours standing in a sweat box! She went from very cool loose summer clothes to leggings and a hot Born in the USA T-Shirt in the hope of getting onstage for Sunny Day, the song Bruce always sings with a child from the audience. We also ended up in a group of people who did not approve of her presence in the audience, and were not afraid to say so. We were blessed by one lovely lady who stood her ground behind my daughter and protected her from the worst shoving crowd I've experienced at Springsteen (another thing that went wrong with having brought her along to this particular concert) But there's more. The heat. It was worse than Adelaide, which was bad enough that a woman fainted with heatstroke beside us. So much hotter. And my 9 year old was wearing her hot leggings and t-shirt. So she really wasn't having fun. And it showed to everyone that she was melting, although I was slow to catch on, and only realised towards the end of the encores that she really was feeling the heat, and not just hating the music.  Which is the final disaster in her experience (well almost). So the Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle did not appeal to her. She wanted the Rock n Roll Bruce show. Hunter Valley 1 would have been right up her alleyway. Brisbane was not. How much of this was affected by the loud shouting directly at her that "she shouldn't even be here anyway" during the opening song I don't know.

I feel better for having vented. There are other, small things that upset me about Brisbane. Some not so small. Despite all this negative writing, I am from this point on going to always focus on the positives I can take out of the experience of the show. These were:

1. Seeing my friend's eyes light up at hearing the sound check played, and not long later at hearing her favourite song "Does this Bus Stop at 82nd Street?"

2. Seeing a lovely young woman in happy tears on her Birthday after meeting Bruce and speaking with him after the concert. 

3. Seeing Gary Tallent with a Tuba  (that's a poor picture of it there! But so funny :)




















4. Remembering all the good times I'd had through the whole tour, and the people who made the experience so special. 

And now I'm done. I can look back on this and laugh, as Garfield has said in cartoons past about terrible mishaps.  

This entire post was inspired by reading 7 Ways to Let go of Insults from an A*Hole 

What's your one important thing?

A discussion with a friend today has inspired today's post.  I was telling her how frustrating the negotiations with the new nursing home are for my father. Clinical nurses trying to wow me with their overwhelming knowledge of 'how things must work' to over come my emotional daughter response. Or something like that.  My friend points out to me that you have to learn which battles are worth fighting for.  

And I've had a 'aha' moment.  Just like that.  

In the past two years in dealing with a range of folk regarding my Dad's healthcare, I've learnt, most often the hard way, that when it comes to negotiating care for someone who cannot speak up for themselves, that the only way to ever 'win' or get a good outcome is to choose just ONE thing.  Making all kinds of seemingly random demands, however well-meaning, serves only to overwhelm staff at every level of healthcare, and to frightening them, and worst of all, to giving them the 'ammunition' they require to then declare you unrealistic and emotional and bring social workers into play to put you in your place (far away from all decision making).

Faced with those daunting prospects, learning to choose just ONE thing to make better, with a fair chance of succeeding and it is remarkable how fast I learnt to ignore some things I found unacceptable in order to continue to fight the good fight about something I found MORE unacceptable.  Eventually however, you can fix quite a few things, as long as you approach it one thing at a time.

I'm sure this isn't a universal guide for all life's adventures, but it certainly provides an interesting point for reflection.  It seems that when we focus all our energies on just one thing we bring a number of patterns into play that actively improve our chances of success compared to a multi-tasking approach.

When you focus on just one thing, everything else fades away
This reminds me a little of the way that gratitude works - when you focus on just being grateful, anger and negativity fade.  Similarly when you focus wholly on choosing a single problem to solve, or action to take, your mind is freed of other cluttering thoughts about other problems, or other choices.  It brings a high level of clarity of thinking to the situation.

One problem is easy to manage
Looking back, I can appreciate how health staff have seen me as an 'emotional family member', even when I didn't see myself that way.  When I tried to discuss 'all the problems' regarding Dad's health and care at once, there were so many, and so many details that it was easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of considerations, and therefore easy to sound stressed and upset.  By contrast, when focusing on just one problem or aspect, it is much easier to sound calm, regardless of how anxious or worried you are on the inside.  

In this same vein, in other life problems, when you see multitudes of problems surrounding you, being overwhelmed can freeze you out of being able to act on any of them.  However focusing on just one problem, or one task is something that is easy to take action on and feel good about quickly.

You get a rewarding sense of accomplishment / finality quite quickly
This is particularly important to me. I'm very much externally motivated, with few internal prompts for action or satisfaction in myself.  I've found that when I focus on single issue items at a time, then I end up with my finality and feedback quite quickly.  Getting a sense of "I did it!" is so rewarding and motivating.  Surprisingly too, realising quickly that something has not worked out or ended the way you hoped is still quite rewarding. It also provides you with a sense of having crossed something off the list, even if the outcome wasn't successful.

Other people have obviously done proper research and noted that:

• Multi-tasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task, and the switch back again.
• Multi-tasking is more complicated, and thus more prone to stress and errors.
• Multi-tasking can be crazy, and in this already chaotic world, we need to reign in the terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm.
• Our brains can really only handle one thing at a time, and so we get so used to switching between one thing and another with our brains that we program them to have a short attention span. This is why it’s so hard to learn to focus on one thing at a time again. (list sourced from focus: single-tasking and productivity)

My brain is now telling me it is time for sleeping, and being now inept at multitasking, I will end tonight's rambles with a link to the words of someone giving advice about how to give up the multitasking mindset:  Why Single-Tasking Makes You Smarter

Sliding Backwards - weight gain and forgetting the 'no excuses' concept

I've gone from a record low weight to an incredibly high weight, coming almost full circle in the 11 months between Springsteen tours.

This led me to google 'backsliding' - which I never knew was mostly used in relation to Christianity and religion!  However some careful google tweaking and I discovered this wonderful insightful article about weight loss.

The Fat Lady Ain't Sung Yet in which Whitney points out the following truism:

"Baby steps.

Forever and ever and ever… baby steps."

I love the insight in this. When things are going well, it is easy to kid yourself that the journey to no-excuses better health will be a one-way trip to forever losing weight until the magical moment that it is 'perfect'. Reality is that there are always things to learn, and if you don't learn them, then the process might be a bit more topsy-turvy. In fact even if you're a fast learner, circumstances can squish in and sideline you with no warning.  So baby steps.

I know that for me, since the second Springsteen tour, I have been focussing on big life changes, the ones that I didn't tackle last year, because last year I was focussing solely on weight loss, exercise and fitness.  It is so much easier to increase exercise, and much harder to permanently change eating habits for an entire family (or even one person within the family). Last year's efforts were child's play. This year asks so much more of me in terms of organisation, willpower and action.  Going for a walk or exercising is as easy as walking out the front door.  Food on the other hand doesn't just appear in the fridge!

The other thing that happened is that I lost my 'network' of fitness friends, and therefore no-one noticed when I stopped exercising, or talking about the healthy food choices I was making. So I've re-established a connection to the four main exercising / food friends I have and we are keeping an eye on each other. I'm posting updates in my "Get Fit for Bruce" Facebook group.  Keeping that social aspect alive will help safeguard me from future weight gains.

And finally, my habits that create a healthy, organised me.  Blogging, gratitude and keep records through RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal.  Of these, only gratitude survived the great weight gain. If I had to keep only one I'm glad it was gratitude, however now is the time to reinstate my previous habits and keep connected with the world in a reflective way, so I remind myself to always be mindful.  No-one else is ever going to be as mindful of my body and my health as I am.

Such an important lesson in taking good care of ones-self.

Chocolate topping and hindsight

Wow, revisiting my most popular post to date... and discovering it was written at what was a very high point in terms of focus.  So much has changed since then, particularly in the 2 months since Bruce and the E Street Band left the country....

Here's the original post:

Thursday, July 11, 2013Negativity - cured by an Attitude of Gratitude!
Sometimes, despite the best intentions, life fills up with it. Negativity. Maybe that's just *my* life, I don't know. I'm only living mine, so I've got no way to know if its me in particular.
Right now for instance, despite being extremely grateful earlier, and looking on the bright side, I find myself not only frustrated, but angry.
Because I'm fed up with blogging and still managing to get lost and feel like I'm making no progress, I'm going to go over the gratitude exercise again.
Tonight I'm grateful for the nap I had earlier, it was pleasant. I'm grateful for my Brucebud, Maggie, who understands.  I'm grateful for the time to write birthday invitations, and that I can let go of the perfectionist in me and make do with what I have designed. I'm grateful to the phone repairer who fixed my broken phone. I'm grateful to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the inspiration to move, to make no excuses and to get out there and be fit. I've lost 13 kgs and that will never come back, because I'll never make excuses for myself like that again.  I might even get within 5kgs of my goal weight for my birthday of 80kgs! 
I'm grateful for just now remembering to drink water, as it will help make tomorrow a better day. I'm grateful to music, that I'm just about to listen to, while I drink some water, and marvel at how easy it is to turn around a very bad mood and attitude into a relatively pleasant mood and very good attitude.
It seems it is impossible to be angry and grateful at the same time. It seems that when your heart and mind is filled with gratitude, those things and people who make you mad don't matter one zot. 
Which is fine by me!Posted by Kat Smith at 1:39 AM 

I am interested to see that even though at the time I felt thwarted, I can see with hindsight that the feeling was perhaps just the hunger for doing more, doing better that was lighting the fire keeping me going, always losing weight, always eating better, sticking to my goals. Or perhaps it was indeed when things started to unravel for me, as I remember feeling a sense of stagnation that started in July last year.

Despite backsliding with the weight loss considerably, the interesting thing is that now I am beginning to tackle some of my life's bigger problems and big decisions. We've left the too-expensive private school, I've moved Dad into a care home closer to where I live, huge life changes are going on.  Having gained 5 kg in this time is a big deal, but perhaps merely a side effect of my not yet having learnt to juggle significant upheaval in my new routine.  When I reflect on my past efforts at fitness, I do tend to achieve a measure of what should be (according to experts) life time habit and increased fitness....and then maintaining or improving further on that is where I come unstuck. I have done this many times in the past, in many different life situations....so for me the trick is going to be keeping that fire lit under my arse that says "get moving" through all kinds of different circumstances.  Certainly the neck injury in November wiped out my walking, however now I have recurrent pain from that without walking, so I might as well keep up the walking and at least get the exercise and endorphins from doing the beneficial things!

Or as Dory would say:

Swimming in my case involves blogging, being grateful, exercising and eating sensibly. Pretty much everything else at the moment is chocolate topping. I have perhaps spent too much time in chocolate topping. There was some gratifying parts to that experience (the chocolate topping of doing 'all the other things' like the Bruce tour, moving Dad, etc) however overall it has made me feel kind of fat and sticky!