Category: Family

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“EnLife”ing COVID19

Hi EnLifers!

So lots has been going on since I last wrote! I’ve endured another 6 weeks of COVID19 pandemic restrictions with no real end in sight! This has included working from home, managing my youngest child’s learning, continuing my weight loss journey and all while trying to maintain healthy relationships with my nuclear family, extended family and friends! Oh and I celebrated a birthday and my hubby’s 40th!  Over the next few posts, I’ll explore all of these things in more depth and share some of the strategies I’ve used to stay sane and “enlife” the situation! In the meantime, here are the cliff notes!

1) Working from Home – I’m not a stranger to working at home since I began working from home when my first child was born and that was 8 years ago! However, I recently snagged an amazing opportunity that required me to work in an office beginning January 2020. It helped me realize that there are always pros and cons to any situation – for instance, I noticed that I’m able to keep boundaries better working in the office. Outside of the office, I feel pressure to always be available which isn’t sustainable – at least not for me. So, though I can’t say that I’ve completely enlifed the situation…yet, I’m working on it and my strategy is just to simply respect boundaries-start and end on time. Period.

2) Managing Children’s Learning while Teleworking– I have two children-5 and 8 and they have been distance learning since March 16. A few ways we have enlifed the situation to reduce stress are 1) we decided to each be solely responsible for one child so that we didn’t have to keep up with two different approaches since they were at two different schools. I took the 5 year old who is in a Montessori Pre-K. So yeah-that’s been interesting, and I’ll go into more details maybe in my next post when it’s all behind me! School ends May 29! Woo-hoo! 2) I came up with a schedule – a flexible one that worked around the set times that the school had, but gave both my son and I breathing room when something urgent came up at work or my son simply wasn’t having it! 3) I had compassion for myself and my son when days didn’t go as I wanted or expected.

3) Weight Loss Journey –I’ll definitely have a lot to share with you on this in some later posts. It requires some background context, but basically I’ve been on a weight loss and body repair journey since June 2015, but really amped it up when I decided to start training for a body building competition one year after my son was born and competed in said competition in November 2016. Since that time, I’ve always thought I’d get back to competing but have not and in the meantime, gained back 57% (at my heaviest) of weight I lost. However, in January, I recommitted mostly due to said job that required I go back into the office. I was steadily losing a pound a week and then COVID19 hit and totally disrupted my groove – which also included walking to work each day! But I refuse to gain the COVID15, so I’ve still been working at it and still losing about a pound a week – except these last two weeks of birthday gluttony! Enlife hacks you ask?! Expend more calories than I take in. I’ll share with you later what all that entails.

I think the biggest, greatest blessing COVID19 has unveiled is connecting virtually with friends which I’d mostly have to do anyway as I live now live far from most of them now. We occasionally text, but we hardly ever took out time to do video chats which personally lift my spirit a whole lot more! It’s been so nice to see their faces, hear their stories, and just be there for each other encouraging, relating, and inspiring one another. I hope that part continues after COVID19 is a distant memory!

Well, that’s what I’ve been up to in these COVID19 times for the most part. You know money stuff is always in the background too, so I’ve got some new developments in that department as well that I can’t wait to share later with you.  What about you?! Please share what you’ve been up to lately and any topics you’d like me to cover in my future posts! Thanks!

MK

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Family and Finances! OH MY!

Hi Enlifers! Hope your 2018 is off to a great start! Now that we’re all hopefully still buzzing from holiday cheer, I’m going to sober it up a bit! Ha! Just kidding – but seriously, something that has been on my mind lately and that is how to balance people, namely family and finances. This is an area I struggle with majorly. As the first to graduate (and actually the only in addition to an advanced degree in four generations), I have been able to earn more than my family in general. I am grateful for their influences and encouragement when I was younger and I have a great desire to help my family. This has evolved over the years. In the beginning, I usually lived out of state, so I wasn’t able to offer hands on help, so I ended up helping mostly financially. However, what started out as being cheerful giving turned into resentful obligation as I began to not agree with some of my family’s financial decisions.  It took me years to free myself of “success guilt” and to only honor financial requests that aligned with my financial beliefs and spirit.  Fast forward and I moved back to the area I grew up. It comes with pros and cons. On one hand, it’s great to have easy access to family for emergencies and just in general. However, it’s a lot easier to say no when you’re kinda far away. The particular situation I’m in now is letting a family member reside with me while they try to find a place to live; however what was supposed to be a couple of months has now turned into 8 months and counting. To be honest, at this point I feel this person is taking advantage of our generosity and kindness, but I always have a hard time balancing the people first and then money thing especially when you feel like someone is taking advantage of you. So I figured I’d brainstorm here on EnLife.  I have thought about all of the various tough situations I’ve been in involving family and finances and narrowed it down to 3 things you need in order to successfully balance family and finances. Those three things are empathy, expectations, and execution.

  1. Empathy – in talking with various friends, one of the things that resonated with me was love. To express real concern and love to the family member instead of judgment and frustration.
  2. Expectations- work out mutually acceptable clear, fair expectations of the agreement and boundaries with the family member. This is actually best done ahead of the financial transaction, but can still be done as a reset if things have gone left.
  3. Execution – execution is really about respect of those boundaries and expectations. If the family member that you are assisting financially is not respecting the boundaries and expectations, then it is more than ok to enforce those boundaries yourself. This is generally when things can go horribly “wrong” and can result in feeling guilty if the family member wants to continue to overstep boundaries. However, I’m learning that it is important stick to those boundaries or else, those things that I mentioned before: resentment, frustration, etc all set in and then sometimes people say or do drastic things they don’t mean or intend.

I could go on and on regarding family and finances and I’m sure there will be posts in the future dedicated to various family nuances and relationships (e.g. couples, nuclear family, etc). In the meantime, I hope these tidbits have served as some nuggets to help your EnLife in this new year! What nuggets do you have to share in regards to balancing family and finances?