THURSDAY, May 16, 2019

I concur! My aunts (mom's sisters) have been a huge part of my life, even as an adult! I love wishing my aunts a happy Mother's Day, and believe me I do because they have been!

Thanks, DD and Devon, I appreciate your support. Truly.

I hope she'll figure this out and do what's best for her. I do know I can't fix anything for her. Or for anybody else. I can only support her and love her, no matter what choices she makes.

It does seem like our relationship choices have the greatest impacts on our lives, positive and negative. And, of course, the pain we suffer is because "life" is trying to teach us the very lesson(s) we haven't mastered yet, but badly need to learn.

Lucky niece to have you! Often it is really difficult for our children to talk to us about things like this.

Thank you, Liz!

Sheesh, what a looooong day! But I'm still following my "unsugared 22-23 hours a day" routine. Gets easier with every day. Not sure if I mentioned that this week I have politely declined Krispy Kreme donughts, various offerings of freshly baked cookies and have thrown away Reese's PB and Chocolate Bunnies! I have stayed out of the chocolate tin in the Kindergarten teacher's cupboard (there are 4 of us who frequent it) and have not touched a damn thing left out in the teacher's lunch room!

Ella is not pregnant. Which leads me to my.....

Second and very large victory of the week in regards to eating! I was able to negotiate my way through that disappointment. While at Peet's Coffee for what should have been a celebratory cappuccino, I made it through the ordering process without buying a pastry or cookie. Normally, under the same cir****tances, I most likely would have gone across the parking lot to the Whole Foods and picked my faves from the cookie bar and purchased by the pound. Instead I read labels and found an organic seed and nut and dried blueberry treat held together by a modicum of some type of organic cane sugar that had a total of 5 grams of sugar. The whole thing was 266 calories. I thought that was an acceptable choice compared to 600-800 calories of cookies. So, no I did not cope with the disappointment without eating something, BUT I am pleased that I was able to choose a much more reasonable treat that was not a trigger food. Au contraire! not a thing trigger-y about chewy bird seed! LOL. Actually the treat was tasty, but when it was gone, I was done.

I was right about my reaction to Ella not being pregnant. I was totally okay with it. Disappointed, sure. But stressed, upset, angry, distraught, feeling victimized by fate, NOPE! No ma'am! My gut level reaction was this: Well, I'll have a lot more freedom to have fun this summer without pups to tend! Yippee!

The crunch is on to get all the end of year school stuff done. Following Liz's (I think) example, I created two separate to do lists for school. One for the end of year stuff and one for Open House which is Tuesday. The end of year list is daunting. I looked at the number of hours involved in completing that work and had to shake my head. A quick calculation told me the work would take approximately an extra work week to complete IF I did it as instructed by the district. Not going to happen. Will have to do it my way and cut that time in half!

So much tough stuff going on with our group. Strength to all!

Devon, congratulations on your multiple, intersecting victories! Given my own sugar challenges lately, I salute you!

And I know all the other teachers here (current and former) appreciate as others here cannot your end-of-the-year pressures. I hope you have a magnificent 2019 summer!

Yes, I can't function without lists - today I need to start knocking quite a few off of my Florida closing list.