Saying NO…

If there is one thing I am not good at, it is saying NO.

It does come easy when it is my kids asking, almost to easy sometimes.

As soon as school started I knew I were in trouble. Mom groups asked me to volunteer, school PTA asked me to volunteer, friends wanted help, family wanted help, my kids needed me, my husband needed me and I had projects I wanted to do on my own too.

After a few weeks I was feeling stressed and anxious. I knew I had to do something about it. I had to learn to say no.

First I said no at church when they asked for more volunteers in the children ministry. It is my space and time during the weekend to have some quality time by myself without the children and it is precious to me.

Then I chose to only do volunteer services that would give me something either socially, creatively, or professionally. With moms groups I am a small group leader and I create a newsletter. At my daughters school I run a volunteer group that meet once a week to help teachers with projects for their classes, this gives me ideas to use myself when I go back to work as a teacher.

I have friends wanting my help with decorating and I have said yes to two just because I think it is fun and I get to do something socially and creative all at once. I also have friends who want me to arrange and host gatherings ever so often and I chose to say no as it was more stressful than enjoyable for me.

I am helping my mother in law clean her house once a week, but she gives back in form of a little pocket money and helping me with the kids. Still I had to say no to her when she wanted to help me by taking my oldest daughter three of the school nights. It just gave me more stress as she would fall behind on her Norwegian studies. Now Isabel gets picked up from school  by grandma two days a week and it is really nice for me.

I am slowly getting my schedule set and everything balanced out. Things are getting done and my stress and anxiety level is slowly going down.

How are you handling the stresses of the daily demands and requests? Are you good at saying no?

A little of track

September 9th I launched my little project of “On the road to a energized life” where I asked everyone to join me in getting physically active to gain energy on a day to day basis.

And that was it. It went of track on the blog and I didn’t even touch my blog until last week again.

So how did I do otherwise?

I started running. First I bought my first pair of proper running shoes. I spent as much money as I could on a pair of fancy shoes at a specialty store, thinking that it would get me motivated by making me feel bad for wasting money if I didn’t use them for running.

Let me tell you, it really worked.

I actually got a few friends to join me. We started out being 4 and it went pretty well. We used a running program called from Sedentary to 5 K and it was at least not killing us easy, at least in the beginning.

As the amount of time spent running got higher, one after the other couldn’t keep it up.

Now we are two and we are totally off the charts. No we have not reached our goal of 5 K, we just decided we needed some more time building up our stamina to get there. I actually did 2 K today.

Our goal now is to be able to do a 5 K by Christmas. And as long as we are able to do 3 runs a week we are happy.

In September I felt myself being full of High Negative Energy and Low Negative Energy. Self assessing myself again I find that I am still full of Low Negative Energy, but I am also full of High Positive Energy. This to me is a good sign.

The High Positive Energy I know for sure comes from running. I actually feel like running now and get jittery if I miss my running one day.

The Low Negative Energy is probably because I have had a lot going on these last few months. I am slowly finding ways to work on these issues and I will talk more about it at another time.

For now I will just celebrate that I am back at blogging and I ran 2 K today.

Quick kitchen tip #1

As you who have followed my blog for a while knows, I don’t have a dishwasher.

I opted to remove my dishwasher and replace with a kitchen cart that gives me a lower surface to knead bread doughs on. Do I regret doing this? No, so far I am really happy about it.

Due to this however I am a big user of sponges to clean everything. Nearly every tip I have read to prolong the life of my sponges have suggested I clean them in my “dishwasher” once a week to prevent bacteria buildup in them.

We all know about the bacterial buildup. It is especially noticeable the morning after your husband or kid used it to clean yesterdays dinner dishes before going to bed. The sour smell stings the nose as you squeeze out the standing water of which it has been laying in.

Here comes my 2 for 1 tip. Drum roll please…..

Once a week or however more often you would like. Place your dripping wet sponge in you microwave. Turn it on full for three minutes. Carefully take out and rinse well. Add dish soap to the sponge and work it to a lather. Place it once more dripping wet and full of soap in the microwave. Turn on full for three minutes. Carefully take out and rinse well.

This as a matter of fact proven to kill 99% of all bacteria and that after only 2 minutes in the microwave. I might be doing some overkill with my routine, but it works for me.

Here is an article I found on this. Microwaving kitchen sponges for just two minutes can kill 99% of living pathogens, a US study in the Journal of Environmental Health claims. Link to article.

Take a moist microfiber cloth and wipe down the inside of you microwave. Not only has the damp from the sponge loosened all the almost burned in splatters in there, but the soap has made it smell good.

So 2 for 1, your sponge is all clean and bacteria free, and your microwave is all clean and shiny.

Do you have helpful little tips like this that helps you in your day to day life?