This is the little harvest my daughter and husband brought home on the 15th of August, bank holiday in Italy and usually one of the hottest days of the year.
I love the colors and I want to remember it...
This has been a very strange summer for the north of Italy: rainy most of the times and with particularly low temperatures. Not the best one for the mood, but a very good one for a very pregnant woman and for fruit and vegetables. This is the little harvest my daughter and husband brought home on the 15th of August, bank holiday in Italy and usually one of the hottest days of the year. I love the colors and I want to remember it...
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It's been a couple of really intense days! It all started Sunday night when I broke my waters and I had not even realized it. After all in the previous delivery it had not happened and it was all new to me. We freaked out, just a little bit, because you're never prepared enough, and even if the hospital bag was ready since the month before, we began to spin like crazy particles all around the house to collect the last things. The contractions began two hours later, on the way to the hospital, and they have intensified only after admission. I chose to carry on labor in the same bed as last time, hoping that I would bring us luck. I was not entirely quiet because I had my 6 years old daughter with us and the all grandparents were far away, but things resolved for the better since the hospital staff let her sleep on a stretcher (nice Italian flexibility!) where she spent the whole night safe, but with her eyes open wide for the too many emotions. Things were so different from my previous delivery. Contractions were becoming more and more intense very quickly and it was clear that it was a matter of hours. I asked for an epidural that I got half an hour later. It was pure bliss. Everybody should be informed about it. Epidural is pure bliss and lets you go through the labour without pain so that you can keep all your energy for the final phase of the delivery. So, at 5 am I started pushing (here is that the pain became intense) and Vittoria was born at 5.15. The nurses placed her on my chest and they let me keep her during the final operations. She was quiet, in contact with my skin. After half an hour I came out of the delivery room walking on my legs and pushing the cradle and I showed the newcomer to his sister, who could not speak with emotion. We spent one hour all together, our new family of four in a small room where I could already breast feed the baby to the breast and have a chat with my eldest. The emotions are very strong. During the pregnancy, I had almost never thought that I would have had that little bundle in my hands. I was to scared from the delivery and the many worries for the baby to think about it. And I did not even understand what a thrill it would be for the father and older sister who are obviously crazy. And now a new story can begin... My due date is getting very close, and so my days mostly go away resting, tidying and playing or going out with my daughter. It is very difficult for me to maintain a regular schedule since I know that I could have to go to the hospital any moment now. And also my head and my thoughts are projected to what will happen in the next days and I have very few free space for thinking and planning. I remember from my first pregnancy that these last days become very annoying and they seem longer than the nine months I have been spending expecting. What I didn't remember, probably because it is actually different is that you are so scared. You think about the baby, and hope that everything will be ok and for that you would like to see her as soon as possible, but then you realize that to see her you have to go through one of the strongest pains on earth and so you prefer to postpone the moment, and so on... Anyway, the totally different thing now is that I have my daughter with me and we are really having fun. 1) Shopping day! I thought I would have spent this august at the pool, trying to find some rescue from the hot, but this was the strangest summer ever in Italy. It rains every day and the temperature is so low. So on thursday we did something strange for us: we spent an entire day shopping. We visited every possible shop checking for the last sales and she had a lot of fun. We ended up buying very few small things that we really like and this goes in the direction of my decluttering idea. 2) Almost finished the baby embroidered bag I am looking forward to finishing it and showing it here! 1) Long walk to make errands (first attempt of a no car approach) Since I am at home from work, I am not moving as much as I would like. It should be the opposite, I should have much more time, but the movement that comes just from having to go to work and moving from one room to the other for the meetings and so on has gone. Again I am trying to set up new routines to have long walks every day but it hasn't been easy because rather it's too hot for me to walk or it rains. This morning I made another attempt: I walked to the market with my daughter on her bike. I am quite happy for the 8000 steps we made, but I am almost dead for the heavy weights I had to casey home. I think this is a routine I will establish after I give birth, and I'll just use the car for the errands in this last pregnancy week! 2) A lot of research and reading for the blog I am focusing on routines and habits and it's incredible how much literature (and web literature) you can find about the topic. One of the most difficult thing is filtering the useful information and the interesting hints from the rest. 3) Rest, rest, rest I am entering my 39th week, so I have to admit, I spend a big part of the day just staying at home, resting, reading, playing with my daughter and it's really nice! In these past years, I've spent my days working hard and then trying to balance life at work and at home, and usually, in summer, we just run away from home to take advantage of every free day to travel or to visit our parents who live far away. This is my first summer after ages that I can spend at home and it's not bad at all. I am enjoying the small things and taking my time for every thing I make. I think I should learn to appreciate it more... Clearly a week is not enough to draw conclusions, but I think that I already learned something from my "One year project". I set up a goal and a series of activities I want to carry on to move towards my target. I decided that as a start, it would be ok to do at least three things per day related to the activities and therefore the goal. If I look back to my past week, almost everything I did was related to the project, whether it was quality time with my daughter, or reading about my goal itself. But I think I am missing something. Every morning I wake up thinking about what I should do to make my day effective and full of valuable things. This is certainly a good step but I think it should be much more easier. What I am missing is routines. I read a lot about habits and routines and I am now convinced that I like to have a life not completely driven by habits, a life where I can choose what to do each day, but, establishing some routines is really important especially if you want to have more time to decide war to do. In my opinion routines are important because: 1) They free up thinking capacity It's trivial, but sometimes we don't think enough about that: routines allow you to know in advance what to do without thinking about that. So once you have established a morning routine that helps you start the day in a positive way, you don't have to think about it everyday. Routines are a method and we often underestimate how much effort and time it takes to organize every day of our life if we don't have well established routines to help us. 2) They help you being more productive Of course, once you have your set of routines well established in your life, your day become more productive. And when I say established, I mean that they have become a habit, they are something you do automatically, without too much effort. It's quite easy to understand that when you know very well what to do and you do it with an automatic trigger, then it's easier to fight distractions. If you have the habit to run every morning, it's much probable that the weather, or a friend's call won't distract you as they may do if you have to decide every day whether you may go running or not. 3) They establish a positive rhythm in your life. Routines help you establish a positive rhythm in your life. Take the smallest example of making your bed in the morning. It is something that also in the military life is considered as a first accomplishment in the day that will motivate you and help you reaching other goals. 1) I almost finished the embroidered hospital bag It's not time to show it yet, but I am quite proud of it, especially because my daughter loves it so much. 2) I colored my sketch Sketching is a passion I have since a couple of years, and I am so sorry that I have had almost no time to practice in the last months. So now I would like to catch up but I find difficult to start. I had a quick one in the weekend and I finished it today just with a very little touch of color. Sketching should be part of my daily routine! 3) Quality time with my daughter: Star Wars! I know it may sound incredible but I have never seen any episode of Star Wars. I have tried, I can tell you, but it's not my kind of movie. Of course I know it's a masterwork and everybody should see it and this is why I have been talking about it to my daughter in the past few weeks. And finally, she asked me to watch it together. We saw half of it (as we always do) yesterday night in bed and we are going to see the rest tonight. And the nice thing is that I am liking it! We've been away for the weekend. Nothing complicated, of course, just a couple of days at my aunt's home. I tried not to forget about my resolutions and so I brought some material with me to focus on my projects, but mainly we spent time together, chatting, laughing, watching movies, listening to music. So, if I have to think about my mind map, what I did was: 1) Cultivate relationships: and I am talking about family, so probably the most important ones. I think it's wonderful to realize that there are some people that you may not hear or see for long periods, but then you always have fun when you have the opportunity to meet them and you can talk about everything with them and things just flow easily in their company, without much thinking about it. Moreover, my daughter had a lot of fun and she cried when we had to come home because she said she liked to stay at home with a lot of people. She also had a lot of fun feeding the turtles of a neighbor that has built a turtle zoo in her garden. And we ate so much good and healthy food, included the cake in the picture! 2) I started sketching again I would like to do it on a daily basis but I am not there yet. Anyway, I went out in the small town where I spent the weekend, with my husband and cousin, carrying our drawing material, and we had some live sketches. I am not ready to publish it because I am finishing coloring it. 3) I finished my weekly book! I finished "The power of habit" by Charles Duhigg. I found it very interesting. It talks about how much habits can influence our life and how habits are constructed. It is a simple and interesting theory that also gives you some insights on how to change some of your bad habits setting up new ones. It's not a manual on self improvement. It's more an interesting study that lets you deepen your knowledge about habits in the fields of private life, organizations, and public life. I would recommend it to those interested in the subject. I decided to go on on this subject and my new weekly book is: "The seven habits of higly effective people" by Stephen R. Covey. 1) I woke up early for the entire week It may sound trivial, but it isn't so for me: I consider myself a night time person and waking up early has always been so difficult for me. Actually this hasn't changed so much, but my pregnancy forces me to wake up almost always before seven o'clock and I quite obviously found out that this is a really productive time of the day, whether I read my book or focus on other activities, I am able to carry on many points on my checklist before my daughter wakes up. More over, I am feeling quite tired in the evenings and this forces us to go to sleep earlier. 2) I posted for five days in a row Again, it may sound so stupid, but I put my blogging activity in the perseverance area that I want to focus on. I want to show myself that I ma able to do something constantly, every day. 3) I worked on decluttering my bedroom I already said that I consider physical decluttering as an important part (for me of course) of feeling better, and less oppressed. Today I worked on come drawers and I threw away a lot of stuff. Now I have free space that will make my tiding up much more simple. Of course, it's a long way to go... I couldn't do too much since I had planned a visit at the hospital because I am at the end of my pregnancy, but: 1) I finished the mind map for my project You can find it two posts below. I consider this as the kick off of my project. I know I am going to change it, but it's the starting point. I included everything that I will try to pursue in my one year. 2) Walk downtown Milan After the visit, we decided to have a walk downtown Milan with my daughter. It was a rare thing since she usually gets bored by walks in the cities, but probably the idea of a giant ice cream in one of our favorite places was enough to convince her. The city wasn't as hot as I expected and it was full of tourists. We had some virtual shopping, meaning that we visited some shops but in the end we bought almost nothing (which by the way goes in the direction of my downshifting process and makes me happy). We also reached 8000 steps which is very close to the 10000 we would all need to stay healthy, and this goes again in the right direction 3) I got rid of my long, cured nails I know this may sound ridiculous but it's a small step in my decluttering process. I loved my long nails and I will probably go back to them in some months, but for now, I can live without them and this will save a little time. After all, as I said, it's a matter of very very small steps... |