My home is filled with peace right now and I am so reluctant to let anything into our lives that increases our stress. JT and I are evaluating everything to see what needs to be in our lives and what doesn't.
Girl Scouts:
A little over a year ago my daughter asked to join Girl Scouts. At the time I was still worried about things like socialization, since we homeschool, and thought that would be a great way for her to stay connected with kids her own age. So I told her she could sign up.
Well, as it often happens, one thing led to another and now I'm a leader and involved in event planning. I have enjoyed this last year, but have noticed that between the demands of homeschooling, homekeeping, parenting and Girl Scouts life has gotten just a little too full. I have had to put homeschooling & homekeeping aside to deal with the demands of GS. I feel we have lost the focus of why we began this journey and need to look and see if we are getting what we had planned on.
Not to mention, Callie is showing less and less interest in GS herself. She hasn't found the friends that she thought she would. We have talked a lot about it and there are certain things she loves. She loves going to Leandra's troop and seeing Emily. Emily is one of the scouts that Callie has bonded with.
I enjoy my troop and working with the girls. Callie seems to enjoy going still, but just barely. She likes the new direction of the troop since we added Leandra and are focusing on being a little more traditionally GS. I'm hoping this keeps her interest and helps it more fully meet her needs. Plus I feel the demands on myself to keep the troop going are reasonable. Since I never was a Girl Scout myself, the addition of Leandra has been heaven sent.
I think that the event planning is the thing that is adding too much of a time commitment and stress to our schedule. I'm pretty sure that I will not be doing it next year. It isn't that I haven't enjoyed working with the other leaders or on the events, but I don't work for a reason. My family and I prefer my time and energy focused on them. The event planning feels to remote to directly involve Callie and takes a lot of time and energy from me that I am taking from somewhere else.
Ultimately I am the one that is shorted. Since I put my kids over myself, as I should, the extra demands of time and energy have come out of doing the things that I enjoy. This has made me a less happy and carefree mom and wife. And even with this, the kids are still having days where I am completely unavailable because I have too much GS stuff to do.
In many ways, the reasons we had for joining last year really haven't come to fruition. I still have high hopes for the troop, but am planning on not returning to the SU team next year.
Softball:
This is actually JT's activity and other than noticing that he is spending a lot of time away from his family for the high demands of it, it doesn't impact me. He has expressed a desire to make sure that it doesn't take over our lives like it did last year. He will not be practicing every day and having tournaments/fundraisers every weekend. I am very pleased with this. I don't want him to quit, but I want to have family time too.
