I’ve had a very low key day, which has been extremely pleasant. I got up to make Big packed lunch, but she said she already had it in hand, so I went back to bed. At the moment the level of pain I’ve got from left shoulder and hip is tiring me out, and the place it hurts least is bed, where I’m warm and comfortable, so I am tending to lie in rather in the morning. Not ideal, and hopefully once I get to see a physio I’ll be able to do something about it, but for now, it’s the best I’ve got.
Tim brought me coffee a while later, and encouraged me to open birthday presents. A lovely and thoughtful range, including a wheat bag for my sore shoulder and a torch with tripod from him, a fabulous dotted notebook (bullet journal here we come) from Small and the perfect winsor and newton brush set from Big (although I did wait to open that when she got in from school).
Smallest and I went for a wander into town this afternoon – she wanted a plain paper journal and I’d looked at notebooks at the Works(affiliate) to see that they had some nice ones, so we went to explore. They didn’t have the ones I’d found online, even thought they’d said available to click and collect (should have done that really!) but she found one she liked and then a little box of wintry books as well, so she was very happy.
And I decided that I’m going to set myself a month by month challenge. I’m going to take this blog right back to its roots as a record of our days, although I may well focus on different topics from time to time. So my first challenge for myself is to write about our days, and specifically my days.
I’ve been keeping up a creative drawing challenge mainly using Draw Every Day Draw Every Way (Amazon affiliate link here with occasional forays into different topics. So for example for a few days I focused on drawings of me for #ActuallyAutistPic on twitter.
I usually pop these pictures on instagram and from there to facebook and twitter, but I’ll try to gather them here as well, not least so that I can see progression in one place. (This may well mean they end up in the next day’s post, as I often draw them very late in the evening, I may well try to rejig that!)
I’m also trying to focus on my writing, after a very positive experience at Write Now Live in Birmingham last weekend. (I might try to write about that in its own post some time next week.) So today, before I did this post I’ve written 1036 words. Going to see if I can create a little widget or something to keep track of progress in a low key way on here.
I think one of the reasons that some of these things are working for me at the moment is that I’ve lowered expectations of myself, and I’m positive when I do achieve things. So it doesn’t matter if a daily sketch is a bit scrappy – it matters that it’s done. It doesn’t matter if I don’t write every day, as long as the story is still bouncing around my head and I scrape some ideas into some form fairly regularly. And it’s OK, really OK to be tired and to sleep a bit more. But I do need to focus on getting the house straightened out when I do have the energy, and I’ll be using my lovely new bullet journal to focus my mind on that.
So that’s where I am today, at the grand old age of 46. If there’s anyone out there reading, it would be lovely to hear from you in the comments <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/72x72/1f642.png" alt="