Two Zero Two Zero Resolved

At the beginning of 2020, I set out with three goals for the year. You can read my original post here. It also explains why I don't do resolutions anymore, but I intentionally think about some mental goals to ground myself for the year.

Here were my three goals for 2020:

1. Finish my cross stitch.

2. Find a new work life balance.

3. Keep my sanity.

Did I accomplish all three? I did, actually. It wasn't always easy, and this year certainly wasn't a straightforward one, but I did accomplish the goals I'd set for myself.

1. I finished my cross stitch.

I won't go into detail about it here as I already wrote a post on it back in June when I finished it for my mid-year check in. So that was a great accomplishment considering I'd finished it after having two kids to look after. Now my next goal is to get it framed and hang it up in my son's room as I had originally intended. That should be a goal for 2021.

2. I did find a new work life balance.

Covid really did me a huge favor on this one. After having my son, the world took a big pause and quarantined/locked-down for about 6 weeks, and even after that, life has taken on a different pace. I did cut my maternity leave very short and returned back to teaching when he was merely 6 weeks old, but it was teaching online without needing to clean the house to be presentable for students. For the first 5-6 weeks after returning to work, I was teaching 7 students a week. It was great. I felt like I had the mommy routine and teacher routine down. In June, I added a few more. It was still doable. Then in August when the new school year began, I added some more, and next year, I'll be adding a few more and considering my studio full once again.

At the beginning of the year I had huge fears about how I was going to breastfeed my baby (assuming my body cooperated) and have my work schedule as well as watching two children. Because of the way this year panned out, I was able to exclusively pump, have an ample supply to feed him and freeze a stash, and have surplus to share. 

3. I did (for the most part) keep my sanity.

To be honest, staying at home and refraining from social gatherings did not affect me too much because I'm an introvert to begin with. I don't really enjoy large groups or crowds so being at home was doing what I enjoyed, for the most part.

It wasn't until about August when I started to really feel the "blues" of being at home all the time. There were just days when I wasn't motivated, didn't want to do anything, and lacked drive. Part of it was not having places to go as a motivator to get my day started. 

One of the outlets I was able to use as a "pick me up" was organization. Like everyone else, I watched The Home Edit, and although not inclined to organize my bookshelves by color or rolling my scarves, it made me want to organize our house.

So we did. We bought all sorts of products and organized our pantry, a built-in cabinet, kitchen drawers, bathroom drawers, and our closet. No, we didn't pay anyone $250 an hour to come do it for us. Yes, I bought a lot of clear storage containers. Yes, it was still expensive. 

Was it worth it? Yup. 

I grew up with a super frugal (and potentially incorrect) mentality that spending money on something to put what you already bought with money into is useless. Well, now that I'm officially in the 30s age range, it's finally clicked that organization is worth it because it changes your perspective and mindset.

That's for another blog. 

Here's a sneak peek at one of my favorite
drawers, newly organized this year.

I hope you were able to reflect on your year and find some silver linings through all the "unprecendented-ness."

Bye 2020. ✌

Mid Year Check-In

At the beginning of the new year, I wrote a post with a few goals I wanted to accomplish. It's my version of a "New Year's Resolution." Well, Unfortunately for most people, 2020 has turned out to be one terrible year. You can read about my take on the terrible twos here, more for comedic relief than real talk. 

A whole six months has gone by. I can't tell you half of what I did in these six months, But I know the time has gone by because:

• I'm not pregnant anymore
• I have a second child
• There are more gray hairs on my head (I think...I'm not really counting...)

I started the year with three general "goals" I wanted to accomplish. 

1. Finish my cross-stitch
2. Find a new work-life balance
3. Keep my sanity

1. Finish My Cross-Stitch

I did! I finished my cross-stitch. I put in extra hours early this year, stitching at night, but I didn’t finish it before he was born. Somehow, after my son was born, I found time here and there to finish! It took me about three and a half years, but I finished it on June 28, 2020. This is my second large-scale cross-stitch that I've finished. Once again, the irony is that when I purchased this cross-stitch, I was living in China and single. When I finished it, I was living in the USA, married, with two kids two and under.

Originally, I bought this cross-stitch with a goal of finishing it before we had kids. That didn't happen. So then, I wanted to finish it before we were done having kids. That didn't happen either...but to my own credit, I only missed that goal by about three months.

Here it is!

Something often overlooked about cross-stitches is actually the back. If you enter a cross-stitch into a county fair or contest, they actually judge you more on the back than the front. Why is that? The back tells about the journey. Anyone can come up with a nice looking design on the front, but it takes dedication and patience to have a beautiful cross-stitch back.

So what is it about this journey that's so important? 

1. No Knots - cross stitching doesn't involve tying any knots. The ends of each thread are secured by looping your stitches on top of the ends. Every time you start a new thread, it must be secured in this way. 
2. Reaching over vs. starting new - I don't know if there's a technical term for this. If anyone's savvy enough in cross-stitch terminology, please let me know! But this is where instead of cutting the thread and starting in a new location, you take your thread from your last ending point and reach across the canvas to start it in a new location, therefore resulting in a very long piece of thread traveling on the back. It makes the back look messy and sloppy.
3. Consistency - The Xs on the front need to be crossed the exact same way in order to appear consistent and neat. This means if you stitch the bottom left to top right first, it has to be stitched first on every single X. When done correctly, the stitches on the back will all appear to be in the same direction instead of alternating vertical and horizontal stitches. 

Is it obvious to tell if someone's taken their time and cross-stitched the correct way? Yes. If you know what you're looking for, it's extremely obvious. One of the most telling signs is that the back of your cross-stitch should look exactly like the front.

Here's my back:

I have to say, I did a really nice job on this cross-stitch. I've been sloppy on previous ones in the past and learned the hard way, hence how I've been able to come up with my mental list of "what it takes to have a good cross-stitch." The design itself is not a difficult one, especially not compared to the last one I finished, but it fits perfectly for why I wanted to finish it: it's for my children. 

2. Find a New Work-Life Balance. 

I have been able to find a new work-life balance. In doing so, I've cut my students in half, I limit the hours I work, and I'm only teaching online right now. For most of this, I have to thank coronavirus actually. If the virus didn't exist, I would have pressured myself into taking all my students back which would be 12+ hours of teaching a week in five days. Add that onto taking care of my kids during the day while my husband was working as well as breastfeeding, or attempting to breastfeed my son, and that results in one crazy mom. 

I'll never forget the day I put my pump on the kitchen counter and pumped during my 30 minute break in between two lessons while cooking spaghetti on the stove for dinner at the same time after my daughter was born. I don't even know where she was. I think my husband was watching her. 

I'll be eternally grateful for coronavirus that I will not have to do that with my son this time around. But that's pretty much the only reason why I'm grateful for this virus. For everything else, it's ruined a lot of plans, trips, outings, and life in general. 

3. Keep my Sanity

As mentioned above, this virus has helped me to keep my sanity in certain ways. In others? Not so much. It's been a new learning curve to figure out how to plan grocery trips now and be intentional about what I buy. I've had to train my daughter into a daily routine/schedule that doesn't involve going on playdates or wandering stores for fun. But we've found other things that she has enjoyed during these last three months of staying at home and staying out of public places, which has also kept us from going crazy ourselves: going on bike rides in the bike trailer, swinging in our front lawn and "blasting off", swinging in our hammock, watching our neighbors mow and trim their lawns, going swimming in our neighbor's pool, watching bunnies and squirrels, digging in our flower beds which don't have flowers, and learning how to be a big sister, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. 

Overall, I think the transition to having two kids while maintaining both of our jobs and general lifestyle has been pretty smooth. The kids have kept me busy during all this staying at home, and to be honest, it's been nice. I wonder to myself what quarantine with no kids would have been like. I think I would have had a lot more time to do the things I wanted to do and no will to do them. Chances are, I would have sat at home, watched a lot of TV, or spent a lot of money shopping online, neither of which I have time to do now.

I hope despite all the terribleness this year has brought for many of us, you've been able to find some silver linings to reach some goals or discover something new for yourself. 

Here's to the second half of 2020. 

Bulbs

In the spring of 2016, we went to a nursery and walked through, perusing various plants. This was before babies and toddlers, when Saturday mornings didn't involve automatic alarm clocks blasting through a monitor.

In particular, I was looking for something that could grow in shade. I happened to come across a flowering plant that grew in partial to full shade: Astilbe. Then, I saw the price tag and decided it was too much to pay for one plant. I took a picture of the plant specs and that was that.

Image from American Meadows product page.

For those of you not familiar with this plant, this is what blooming Astilbe looks like.

I saved the picture on my phone to remember the name of this plant. The year after, we even went back to the nursery in search of it again since I had decided to fork out the money. It wasn't there. Thus ended my search for Astilbe, for a while.

Fast forward three years. We were stuck at home with a toddler and a newborn. I wasn't working for the interim, and I was itching to do something. I did a search online and found Astilbe bulbs at a much nicer price, and it happened to be the planting season for our growing region. Now, despite being an amateur gardener, I understood that growing a plant from a bulb was more difficult than planting a grown, potted version. I decided to take the chance and buy a pack of five bulbs. That would have been about the number of plants I'd wanted anyway to fill the space.

The bulbs arrived and my husband planted them on April 16th. We watered and waited. After about two and a half weeks, we saw our first sprouts. One bulb sprouted first and then another shot up a few days after that. Unfortunately the other three didn't fare as well, so I only have two plant babies.

Being in the middle of a strange time in the world, watching these plants has made me remember that nature doesn't need us. When I was a senior in high school, we watched a video during class one day about earth without human existence. While most everyone else was probably zoning out, I have since remembered the general concept of that video: earth thrives without us. Grass and plants would grow wild and spread as they wished. The air would be cleaner because factories, machines, industry would not be running. The water cycle would balance itself out once again without human interference and consumption. 

As I already stated, I'm not the best at taking care of plants or gardening. My interest in this area is severely handicapped by my abilities. I've had many "plant projects" halted or ended because I didn't know what next steps to take. I'm hoping this one can continue at least a year, depending on how well I winterize them once the cooler weather returns. I actually don't know what colors my blooms will be as it was a mixed bag. I'll have to wait for their blooms to find out. Let's hope they bloom.

This will need to be added to my list of goals in 2020 I'd written about earlier this year and revisit the ones I'd originally stated.