A Collective Breath

Another Tuesday another full day of Johnnie school, with the possible relief that it is the last few days before the Thanksgiving break and Johnnie won't have any school next week. In the meantime, people in my orbit seems to be taking a collective breath too. In my IS Team Meeting we were missing James and Nelson who both called in sick. Can't really blame anyone especially after the message from our CEO at the meeting yesterday that it becomes more important than ever that we take care of ourselves. I'm thinking to myself I probably need to do a little bit of self-care too even though I also felt the need to step up on exercise. This despite experiencing some numbness in the outer region of my left big toe would indicate that perhaps I may be overdoing it just a bit in terms of the steps I put in every day. Still for the first time in months I've started to do the nitric oxide dump exercises again. That is part of the self-care I think. Getting focused on the internal work is too, but that is really hard, especially with Johnnie in the house. I have noticed I stopped doing my image cycling exercise and I really REALLY need to pick that back up. But then again, perhaps one way to look at it is that Johnnie is actually the one giving ME lessons. And the lesson is STILL to watch my state, watch my thoughts, watch my reactions. Anxiety means I'm focusing too much on a future that does not exist. Anger means I'm focusing too much on a past that no longer exists. What an amazing lesson.  In the meantime I am happy Johnnie is learning all about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims in his Social Studies class, I'm happy he's immersing himself in more advanced books in EPIC Scholastic, and most of all, I'm happy he's into the school experience even though it is remote. He still feels involved enough to ask me to go scootering to school at some point today so we could see the Thankful Tree the kindergarten teachers put up made up of the kid's leaf artwork in the style of George Seurat. I will repeat that it made me glad that he has already learned about art and painters like Seurat. And that he was proud of his work. We even ran into one of his classmates who was also there to see the tree. I was surprised he recognized Nico, considering they only see each other on Zoom. See? Immersed into his class and classroom experience. BTW, we only went there late in the afternoon because we basically skipped his computer programming class. It was the last meeting and he had already done his project, uploaded it, and got his certificate of completion. He did just fine. And hopefully I can pick it back up with some Scratch Jr exercised online so he can continue to develop. And he also had already done his swimming lesson with Stacy. He was very hesitant right before the lesson. To the point where he was even crying that he didn't want to go swimming today. Must be some old program flitting about his conscious brain. I didn't know why he had gotten so upset. But I did get him in his wetsuit and he did manage to get through the entire hour. He wasn't even that upset anymore after a few minutes. I successfully interrupted an old pattern I guess, which is a good thing. For me, it was a very good re-do of the little incident on Saturday when I lost my temper. This week I am FOCUSED on not doing that. How do I do it? Again by controlling my state, making sure I don't immediately react, and making sure I ask the question... how does the best version of me handle this? When I do that, the right answers always find their way to my consiousness. And so what ended up happening today was that Johnnie got through his classes just fine, I didn't lose my temper at any point and even when he started to do roughhousing stuff with me, I managed to get him to stop and at least work on his impulse control. I mean he's a kid! Of course he's going to have issues with impulse control. I remind myself that it is what I teach him now... at this time.... to learn how to handle it is what's going to make a huge difference when he gets older. I am not going to be the one that has left a negative programming imprint on him. Already the need to be perfect, the program that governs Lisa, has already seeped in a bit. Which is why I'm trying to temper that with letting him learn to manage his impulses. And getting him to learn to be ok with just ok, while also learning that he is more than just ok already. I mean my kid did Georges Seurat art! How amazing is that?! As for me? I guess I would say that I took a breath out today by not focusing on work so much LOL. I focused on Johnnie and it felt very very good. Now if only I can get him to eat more than just Panda Express teriyaki chicken for dinner...