Decisions

This has been a pretty trying week for me.  I am struggling with a lot of different things and felt I needed to make some decisions.  This semester I took one more class than I had been taking the past 2 years.  Previously I have been taking only two per semester but if I wanted to graduate in the spring, I had to take three.  I knew this was going to be hard, but I don't think I knew how hard it would be, especially with all the other things I have going on.

I think what made this so hard to figure out what to do was the fact that I am doing extraordinarily well in my classes.  But what is happening is other parts of my life are suffering.  My kids are feeling the stress,my job performance is suffering, and my house is feeling pretty neglected  as well. So I finally came to the decision to drop my most demanding class.  This was a really tough decision and it didn't come lightly.  Brent and I had been discussing for a few days what all out options could be.  Could I quit my job? Would I be able to spend some time trying to supplement our income by making things to sell?  Should I cut back on work even more, only work 16 hours a week?  Maybe I would quit school altogether, work full time again.  I even considered putting the little ones in daycare for an additional day and I would use that time just for studying.  I have learned it is nearly impossible to study with kids around.

So that was it.  I figured this would allow me more time at home to get some things done, still work and bring some income in, and still finish my other two classes which I am certain I will do well in.  What it means is another whole year of school.  Granted I will only need one class each semester so I will be able to focus on it so that will make things easier.

Even though I dropped the class, I am still going to be pretty busy.  But I have some things I have been working on in my head that I want to implement.  I have a little fairy vision in my head of what I want my life to look like.  My life presently does not resemble that at all yet but I am really going to work on it.  Hopefully it will all be blogworthy and I still have some entries to make that I haven't gotten around to.

Some of the things on my list are:

• Make Halloween costumes.  I have all the supplies needed for Taylor's and I can tell it is going to be awesome!
• Make and stick with a weekly meal list.  We are wasting so much money each month because of impulse grocery shopping that it is uncalled for.  This definitely needs some intervention.
• Clean my freakin house.  I will be honest when I say I let it go this last month.  Time for a deep clean
• Organize.. I want to be organized everywhere! Kids toys, pantry, crafts, garage.. why is it so difficult. I see so many bloggers that make it look so easy.
• Paint.  We are working on Taylor's room now, I am going to make curtains this week and then we need to paint it.
• Schedule time to exercise.  Now that I don't have to run out and get to class by a certain time.. Spencer and I are going to make some use of that time to go walking.  I am not going to hit my birthday goal but by golly I need to get close.

So that's just a sampling of what I want to work on.  This weekend we are going to pick apples.  I am going to get a lot more this year so I can make loads of applesauce and I would actually like to try and can some pie filling.  I'm also going to make some smaller jars of apple butter again.  I love the fall harvest.  What are some of your fall festivities?