7 Quick Takes about Napping or Not Napping, Deciding on Chicken Noodle Soup, and Seeking My Children's Assistance with My Self-Improvement

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

I love living in New England. Practically every day, no matter what season it is, I look around while I'm driving here, there, and everywhere and think "My gosh, this place is beautiful. I can't believe I get to live here."

I wasn't successful in seeing the Northern Lights or the comet, but this is the kind of picture you can just randomly snap without looking on the way home from the temple so I'm not complaining at all.

On this same drive, a deer wandered out into my lane and then bounded up and over the median wall to the other side, it was very cool.

We know families who have moved away from New England, usually to be closer to their grown kids or their aging parents, and I feel a bit of panic like "Noooo, I can't leave here, it's too beautiful." But I said the same thing about the baby and toddler stage, and one thing I've learned is that life does its thing and it doesn't do much good worrying about it, you just have to find the beauty wherever you are.

—2—

I've been going to bed way too late, and I have definitive proof because I'm tracking my sleep in my little self-improvement journal and it's there in undeniable black and white. In fact, it's worse than I thought.

The dumb part is, I should really start taking naps so I'm not a zombie all day. But I consciously decide every day not to take a nap so I'm tired at bedtime, and then I STAY UP LATE ANYWAY. 

It doesn't matter how tired I am, sleeping is boring and there are a million things I would rather do so avoiding naps is not working.

—3—

I've also been tracking how much water I drink, and that's been going much better than the sleep thing. 

At first it was a real struggle to choke down 6 to 8 glasses of water a day, but now that I'm used to it I actually feel pretty good. I also have to pee all the time.

—4—

I've been majorly productive this week. I cleaned out two cars, did multiple mending/sewing projects that I've been putting off for years (literally), and started on a few things related to Christmas.

Getting a head-start on Christmas is huge for me. To illustrate how I usually operate, let me share a conversation I had with a friend recently:

Friend: So what do you do with your third car now that your two oldest are at college and your teenager doesn't have his license yet?

Me: I mostly drive the third car, but I drive the van when it runs out of gas.

Friend: Doesn't Phillip ever fill up the tank?

Me: (shrugging) If it's out of gas when he gets in it.

She started laughing but I wasn't joking. For a lot of things, we are wait-until-the-gas-light-comes-on, don't-do-it-until-it's-an-emergency people. 

—5—

This week I've brought meals to a few people from church who are having a hard time, and my go-to dinner for that purpose is homemade chicken noodle soup (to clarify, I don't make the noodles or the broth from scratch, but I do buy the ingredients and assemble them myself). Chicken noodle soup is an infinitely scalable meal, limited only by the size of your pot. And we have a really big pot.

I remember reading in a book called The Lazy Genius Way to "decide once," meaning figure out how you're going to handle a specific situation and then always do that thing on autopilot forevermore, whether it's wearing the same outfit every Monday or bringing the same gift to every birthday party your child gets invited to. 

Or automatically making a cauldron full of chicken noodle soup whenever somebody needs dinner brought to them.

—6—

In July we had a horrible flight experience. Our plane finally took off after a 5-hour delay, stranding us in our connecting city after midnight with a mile-long line for one single customer service agent handing out hotel vouchers, so we left and paid out-of-pocket for a hotel room.

I figured earlier this month that it was worth seeing what American Airlines customer service could do for us, and they responded with $50 flight credits for each person. A check for the full amount of the hotel room addressed to Mrs. Jennifer Evans came in the mail a few weeks later.

Ever since we flew American Airlines 18 years ago with a toddler who threw up on the plane and the flight attendant was extremely unhelpful (we had nothing to clean it up with, couldn't you at least give us some of those little cocktail napkins from your beverage cart??) I've had a chip on my shoulder. But I've now changed my mind about them.

—7—

As you can see in Take #2, I need help motivating myself to get to bed earlier. So I asked the kids to help me. They agreed to police me on a few rules about using the computer after dinner, and then designed the most annoying bedtime alarm for my phone to go off at 9 PM every night. 

Imagine an out-of-tune clownworld theme song blasted on the recorder (listen to what it sounds like here if you dare), and then a robot voice reads the name of the alarm out loud. The kids named the alarm "It's bedtime, Stupid!"

Like I said, I knew they would be super helpful.

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