A Rhythm of Self-Care | The Parenting Passageway

Recently a friend and I made a list of what we wanted to see in our own self-care. Self-care is the basis of family life and because we carry much of the labor and emotional holding for the family (and even more if you are educating your children at home).

I would like to say that I put myself first and do these things before I start my day, but honestly self-care is still kind of squished in around work, homeschooling, farm life, parenting. Many times I have to jump out of bed and get ready for work or dive into farm chores.

It helps me to look at targets in self-care for the whole week, not by day, because it’s easy to miss things on any given day and feel badly. I will confess it is much easier now that my children are older. If you are looking to garner self-care and your children are very small, I think you need very bite-sized pieces that take 10 minutes or under multiple times a day or you need to have help to watch your children in order to have a bigger piece of time. Some pieces of self-care you can have your children do with you! I know for me, my husband traveled all week long for years when our children were small, and having three children of varying ages didn’t seem feasible to really ask someone for help a lot.

This is my self-care list:

My absolute daily things:

Prayer and meditation. I start every morning with affirmations that I hand wrote for myself. This started when I had a lot of uptick in anxious thoughts and it was helpful. I also read Psalm 91 outloud at the beginning and end of the day. I usually listen to Meditation Mountain on Spotify in the car.

Water. I use a stainless steel water bottle and carry it around.

Dry brushing. This can be hit or miss for me.

Supplements. I have a small and manageable list of supplements that I have found helpful for being older. I tried to have more supplements and use a pill box, but that was overwhelming and I still would often forget to take them so I just pared my list down to the essentials.

Exercise and move – this is actually fairly easy to hit on the days I do the horse care, but other days I need to plan a bit more for this. The days that I work and see patients in office I usually don’t exercise because I have the commuting time, notes to write, and I am mentally exhausted. Just being honest.

Happy Music 🙂 Again, easier to listen to adult music now that my children are all ages almost 13 and up!

Read books! I read daily.

Talk to my close friends.

End the day early. We have a pretty quiet house at night usually. In the winter we usually do night check around 9 or so, but in the summer it’s easy to do chores right after dinner and be done for the night.

The other things (daily if I can, weekly if not):

Food Prep- I do prep things every few days typically and put in the refrigerator. Sometimes this is just chopping up fruits and putting them in mason jars so things are visible, pan roasting veggies and having those on hand, making chia seed pudding or overnight oats, or it can be prepping an entire meal I can put in the crock pot or instant pot.

Napping/resting. On the days I am home, I still like a quiet time after lunch and on the weekends, I like to nap if I can.

Spiritual – worship on most Sundays, and I have a smaller group on Thursday mornings. Both have online options which can be helpful since our place of worship is about forty minutes away.

Date Night! Now that our children are older, we can go out by ourselves and it’s easy. I love Thursday nights for date night. Thursdays are such a good day of the week for me!

Writing and painting. This requires being alone and focusing, so this is much easier than when my children were small.

What kinds of self-care things do you love to do? I would love to hear from you.

Blessings and love,
Carrie