The waves have stopped crashing onto us. We are not trying to keep our heads above water anymore and we can finally breathe again.
For the past few weeks we have endured a flat tire, two back injuries, all six of us having the stomach flu and our 18-month-old twins having a horrible case of hand, foot and mouth disease. We were hit hard.
You can read more about our experience with hand, foot and mouth disease on Yummy Mummy Club: Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease: The Illness from Hell
But a week has passed and although we have been left with some scars, it seems like the clouds are parting.
My husband, Mike, and I have been realizing lately, that we haven’t really seemed to be able to move out of survival mode. Not just coming home from our long vacation, or dealing with tons of illness, but long term survival mode. In fact, if we are being really honest, we never shifted out of the phase we entered during my pregnancy with our twins.
Recently, Mike and I have been having a lot of discussions about where we are struggling, both as a unit and as individual people. As far as our relationship and marriage goes, we have a handle on that, thanks to date night and LOTS of communication.
But we have really started to discuss our future, our health, our finances and our happiness, and have had some eye-opening revelations.
Knowing we are finished having children and moving out of the baby phase is really exciting, but also scary. For years we bounced from planning, to pregnancy, to new baby phase and then back to planning for our next. All which gave us the constant excuse to live in survival mode: slack with tidying up, allow clutter to build up, be relaxed with our spending, stay cooped up and let our weight and health slide.
But, we are on the other side now. We are trying to learn how to be responsible, well rounded adults again. We dug ourselves into a survival hole and now we are figuring out how to climb out.
It’s going to take time, but we are on the same page.
What do you call not being in survival mode? Living? Thriving? Routine? All of those sound great to me!
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