“Give To Yourself” {Share Your Life}

This past week I got together with a group of my Mom-friends for our monthly book club meeting… except at this book club- we don’t always read books- sometimes we watch a movie ahead of time so that we can all get together and discuss it. Our movie choice this past month was “Somewhere Between” an incredible story that follows four girls who were adopted from China, and shares how they feel about adoption, searching for birth families, how they see themselves, and how they feel that the world sees them. The movie itself is fantastic, and if you are a parent of an internationally adopted child- I highly recommend it!

But as we were chatting about the movie, some of us were mentioning the challenge of actually fitting movie-watching time into our schedules…..and when one of my friends said that she had sat down for a few hours that same day to re-watch the movie and “bonus film” in preparation for our get-together, I teased her asking “How did you ever find three hours in a row to do this?” and she smiled and said “My Mom taught me to give to yourself”.

Wow- I sat back and let that statement sink in. Give to Yourself.

And I quietly realized as I was sitting there that one of the reasons I have felt so overwhelmed and just so damn busy lately, is that I have forgotten how to do just that- to give to me. So I made a plan to re-work my schedule a bit, take on a little less freelance work, and open up my Fridays so that I can finish tasks related to blogging and my job and actually take the weekends off. I need to stop using my weekends to catch up on all of the little things that I didn’t get done during the week, and instead use them to give back to myself.

So this weekend I read a book by the fire.

I worked excitedly on planning my dream vacation “Out West” this summer with my family- reading about the national parks I’d like to visit, things to do there, looking into places to stay, and putting together the framework of an itinerary. I sent emails off and had planning phone calls with family members who want to join us for part of the trip… and then started working on creating a budget to see if we can really pull this whole thing off…..

But just making the time to do these things for myself gave me such joy and happiness, that I truly felt that I had given to myself. So Wendy (not sure if you even read my blog!), thank you so much for those words…. “give to yourself”. I needed to hear that this week.

Each week Nicole from Moments that Define Life and I present our Share Your Life Link-Up a place where you can link up any post that shares a bit of your life with us! Link up here or at Nicole’s blog and have your post displayed in both places! We’d love for you to join us!

Feel free to grab our button.. you can find it in my sidebar!

So please link up if you wrote a recent blog post that shares your life… or please take a moment to leave a comment and tell me how you’ve given to yourself this week! Inspire us all!