- To Do Lists. To Do Lists basically help me function. I have a weekly To Do List and then write daily To Do Lists and I put the dumbest stuff on my daily lists. Stuff that I am absolutely going to do whether or not it’s on my list. But I mix it in with the stuff I do need to remember or that I would put off otherwise and then I feel so successful when I cross off something easy like “Take the garbage out” or “sweep the kitchen”. Anybody else work this way?
- All the assorted Valentines Day celebrations of the week. Turns out Valentines Day is a Big Deal in elementary school and it was so fun to watch Pearl get to enjoy it.
- Nova Scotia has a new premier named Iain Rankin. NOT the same person as the Scottish novelist but a Facebook thread started by a former bookstore co-worker of mine showed me that I was not alone in my initial reaction. (Namely thinking, “Ian Rankin is Canadian? And in politics?”)
- A snowy day. We’ve had a cold snap this week with temperatures dipping below zero (very unusual for us) and on Wednesday we had snow fall most of the day. Almost none of it stuck but it was nice to watch it fall from inside our cozy house.
- Also celebrating Chinese New Year around here!
- Dress up day at school. Obviously that means Rose dressed up too.
- Pearl had a day off school and Rose and I were so excited to have her home for an extra day. We had the best day all together. Wore our pyjamas all morning, baked cookies, played, went for a bike ride, watched a movie. And then, as a cherry on top, the girls both liked the new recipe I tried for dinner! Monday is also a holiday here so we’re going into a long weekend!
(Yes, they love to match. They wanted to be twins that day and were convinced that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.)
- This quote that has been running through my head as I work on my own patience, especially in my role as a mother:
Patience is one of the places where faith, hope, and love meet up.
– N.T. Wright
Happy Lunar New Year! Happy Valentine’s Day!
Karissa Reads Books 
I am the same with to-do lists! I have a bullet journal and while I see other people do beautiful things with theirs, mine is literally just there for me to write lists in! 😂 Also, I love that quote you shared at the end!
I’m glad I’m not the only one! I write my lists on scraps of paper and my husband always teases me about them!
I do the same thing with lists! I don’t use them all the time, but when I need a productivity boost I definitely put as many things on a list as possible so I can get into a groove of checking them off, even if half are just fluff items to trick me into doing the real tasks.
Also, I love that Rose dresses up too on Pearl’s dress-up days, and that they’re so eager to match!
I hope you’ll all have a good long weekend. 🙂
Yes! That’s exactly how I use my lists. It creates a rhythm of Getting Stuff Done and somehow it’s easier to move into the big stuff if I can check off a few little things too!
I have lists for home and lists for work, lists of books I’d like to read, lists of crochet projects… the list goes on!
Oh, I didn’t even mention the lists of books! So many lists!
I don’t now but I loved to-do lists when I was working and deliberately filled them with lots of easy every day one-minute tasks alongside the real stuff, so no matter how bad a day I had it looked as though I’d been super-productive! The things we do to fool our brains… 😉
I’m glad I’m not the only one fooling my brain into productivity! If it works, it works though and I feel good about it at the end of the day when I’ve checked everything on the list off!
I love this quote about patience! A Happy Chinese New Year to you and your family!
Thank you!
I put things on my Google calendar so I have a sense of when I thought at a previous time that I should be doing something. It prevents me from sitting and staring at my phone or the TV for too long. I’m home today (Monday) because we have Presidents’ Day. Hope something presidentially good happens.
That’s a good idea! Yesterday was Family Day here. Which is basically a holiday they made up a few years ago because there’s no break between Christmas and Easter otherwise!
Yah, that whole space between Christmas and …..what…..4th of July?? feels like forever here, so we have all kinds of funny holidays, like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents’s Day and Memorial Day, and, for some reason, Easter.
We have Victoria Day in May but there isn’t much else aside from Easter. Though our family always looks forward to Spring Break so that gives a nice break at the very end of the winter/beginning of spring. I’m all for made up holidays!