Tag: baking bread

Fat Fridays: Mental Health Check In

Happy Friday everyone. 

It’s 8:45am and I’ve already had a busy morning. Made homemade muffins for the kids for breakfast. I’ve got a big batch of yeast bread started, sitting in a bowl on the mantel to rise. Walked around picking up all the winter clothing that was left on the floor yesterday after we had a small batch of snow (only happens a couple times a year for us). Lit all the candles in the house in an attempt to chase off the gloom from this cold gray morning. I’ve cleaned up several messes from my son’s puppy that we are babysitting during the day while he’s at work. And also let my cats in and out the door about 5,000 times. 

And I’ve been trying really hard to not be snappy at my kids. This is their second snow day home and in my current mood, I’ve found it challenging to have to deal with arguments, fussing, and just a bunch of energetic kids bouncing around the house. (Stop throwing playing cards at my candles, No, we are NOT playing basketball in the house, yes, we ARE going to clean your room, No, we are NOT going to do a science experiment that involves setting paper on fire.) 

I am struggling a lot with depression and irritability. I’ve been working on getting back to healthy eating, cutting out sugar and processed foods again, and my body is in shock and not happy as it is deprived of all it’s junk again. I know I’m making progress, I’m starting to crave healthy food again and I haven’t had a hard time staying away from the bad suff, but it always puts me in a bad mood when I come off sugar and junk. I have a feeling a lot of that is just physical things happening in my body. 

I’m coming off the High of the Holidays and feeling a predictable blah-ness from resuming normal life again. 

The last two years have been pretty traumatic and so I find myself facing this new year with a lot of hesitancy. What craziness is going to happen this year? 

We’ve got an upcoming court date for our foster daughter and I’m having to face a lot of inner-demons as I resolve to make my voice heard instead of staying quiet. 

I imagine everyone has a list of reasons for why their mental health is not doing so great right now. 

What am I doing about it? 

Well, I’ve been really focused on keeping my home in a constant state of tidiness and order and coziness. It is calming to me to sit in a clean room with candles lit and some pretty things to look at. I tend to be very comfortable with clutter and chaos, but lately I’ve been going the opposite direction and needing everything orderly and in its place. 

I’ve gotten back into daily Bible reading. I have a 12 month Read the BIble in Year. Each day has a date and a passage from the Old Testament, the New Testament, a Psalm and a Proverb. I have decided to start in the month of December and work my way backwards, cause that just feels more doable for me. I am finding this reading time to be a time of calm and peace. 

I am working hard on getting our whole family eating healthy again, and one of the things I’m focusing on is baking our own whole-grain bread again. I used to do this a lot, years ago, and then stopped. I find that I need to bake about every two days in order to keep up with the kids. There is something very soothing about making bread. It makes me feel grounded and connected to the earth. Weird? I don’t know. I just know that I am enjoying it and find it soothing. 

The last thing is I am trying to keep life as simple as possible. I’ve had to hit pause on keeping up with community events and concerns, what’s happening in our country, and just focus in on my home. 

And even doing all that, it’s still been a struggle. But, I’m hopeful. My body is going to adjust to the healthier diet again, we’ll get past our court date, spring will come again. Life keeps moving. We just have to take it one day at a time. 

Living the Pinterest-Worthy Life

  • breadpic

So, I almost posted this picture on Facebook this morning. “Fresh bread for breakfast!” and some other junk about what a great idea I had last night to make dough and let it rise in the night, and then get up early and finish making delicious bread.. Yay me… etc etc.

I tried to post it on Facebook, but then I got a fail notice and a message saying that perhaps my Facebook was being impersonated and maybe I should exit this site. Then my phone messed up completely and I had to shut the whole thing down and restart it (apparently the solution to all things technological). Then while I was trying to get my phone restarted, my child asked when we were headed off to their doctors appointment? And I suddenly realized that maybe I should check that appointment time again, maybe I had remembered the wrong time. So my phone finally comes on and I check my calendar again, and yep, I had the time wrong and we actually only had 20 minutes to get to the appointment. I start yelling, quick, put your shoes on, I’m going to go grab my shoes.. I run into the kitchen on the way to my bedroom and see that some impatient child has torn a hunk off the top of my loaf of bread.. AAAACKK!!!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!!!! The guilty party looks at me and says, Can I have a piece now?? Now I’m mad that someone destroyed my beautiful loaves of bread. I run over to the drawer, grab a knife and start hacking the loaf into slices..But wait. This bread isn’t cooked all the way through! How did that happen??? I checked the bread before I took it out!! AAAAARRRGHH! I grab the bread, throw it back into the oven, minus the loaf pans, randomly turn the oven onto a temperature, set the timer…20 minutes? Will that be long enough? Who knows. I’ve got to leave and it’s going to be my kids turning off this oven while I’m gone. I inform the older child, who will be in charge, that they must turn off the oven when the timer goes off and then I run for my bedroom to grab socks and shoes. Child and I run to the van and I yank open my door, try to put my foot up on the step and instead my foot comes in contact with an apple (Why is there an apple on the step????). The apple goes flying into the yard. I retreat and pick it up, toss it back into the car and try to pull myself gracefully into my seat. I miss somehow and thud into the steering wheel. By this time I don’t care that I’m swearing and being a bad example to my child. We finally get on the road.

As I calm down a bit and try to drive carefully to the the doctor’s office, I think about the picture that I had tried to post earlier. What a joke. I’m not sure why, but occasionally I just give in to temptation and I take these glossy pictures of my life that really have no basis in reality. In order to take this picture I had to move all the dirty dishes on the table off to one side so they wouldn’t show up. Then I had to crop the top of the picture so you couldn’t see the pile of junk I have stacked against my kitchen wall. There’s a pretty little teapot which gives the impression that I’m about to sit down to a nice hot cup of tea. Well, that would be nice except that this teapot was used yesterday by my daughter and it never got washed out or put away. It’s just sitting on my table.

Did I also mention that even though I left the dough to rise all night, it didn’t rise very well because our heaters are not working. And I was supposed to keep my wood burning stove going all night, but was too tired to do a good job of it. I pulled myself out of bed around 3:30 am, stumbled into the living room saw that I only had a couple embers left, threw some logs in and hoped for the best. The best didn’t happen. The logs didn’t catch on fire. Which means at 6:30 this morning when I got up, the house was freezing. And let me tell you. I am amazed that house fires ever happen. Especially when I diligently stack paper, and lint and cardboard and wood in a nice neat pile in a nice wood stove, light several matches to it and then they refuse to catch on fire. Who knew that paper was so Not Inflammable.

Here’s the thing. When I took that picture, for that brief moment in time, it was true. I had made bread. It looked beautiful. My teapot looked beautiful. I was feeling peaceful. Life felt calm and pretty…And then all hell broke loose.

It’s the same in life. I was telling someone how I was doing so much better from my depression. Things that had helped me. And everything I said was true. And then that same day turned out to be a horrible day where I was fighting to stay engaged. Fighting to not listen to the voice that gives me detailed lists on how I am failing at everything. Fighting to not be discouraged. That too is true. The hard part is accepting that my life is never going to be picture perfect all the time. I will certainly have moments that are Pinterest-Worthy, and it’s ok to celebrate those moments. But I’m also going to have a lot of moments where I’m throwing bread back into an oven and tripping over apples. And it’s ok to talk about those moments too. It’s what makes us real.

So, if you ever see a beautiful picture on my Facebook pointing out some amazing feat of baking or decorating or whatever that I’ve accomplished. Just keep in mind that I probably had to hide some dirty dishes and maybe kick some trash out of the way so I could take that pic. I’m not brave enough to post pictures of my mess, but maybe I should. Just to keep it real.