Hole in the Wall

I used to cry over every little thing. I was one big emotional rollercoaster of a mess. Once I became a mom I felt like it toughened me up and I wasn’t as afraid to speak up for myself and my kids and I didn’t cry as much (after the first few hormonal months).
But I realize I am still quite an emotional person but instead of just crying when I feel like it, I bottle it all up until one day I explode. And boy did I explode yesterday.
I haven’t quite figured out everything that I have been suppressing but it’s a combination of being tired, kids driving me crazy, and M traveling a lot lately.  He’s pretty much gone 4 out of the 5 days each week and it will probably continue like this for the next few months. When he gets back he is also exhausted from the traveling and the grueling work week. And for some reason our weekends have been so busy as well that there is hardly time to rest, even though we both need it.

And so I try to do as much as I can but I can sense the impatience and annoyance building up in me and when the kids are driving me crazy (as they so often do) I just need to shut the door and let out all my anger.  And so I punched and kicked a hole in our bedroom wall.  I even shocked myself.  It felt like an all time low in motherhood in so many aspects.

Well, that certainly got M’s attention and I got a lot of time to myself the rest of the night.  I admit that I need to find some better outlet of letting my anger and other emotions out.  Maybe getting back into a good exercise routine again and being okay with asking for help from others and to just cry when I feel like it.

And now I’ve got to watch youtube and figure out a way to patch up this hole.

Accomplishment

In the last week a work opportunity just fell into my lap and if all works out well I might be able to start doing some mechanical drawings for a friend’s company. It would be a few hours a week, I can work from home, and the projects would be non time critical. At this season in my life it’s a great job.
I haven’t touched any CAD software in 7 years now so my husband suggested that I try and play around with Google Sketchup to try and get back into the groove of solid modelling. He actually had a project I could do for his company on Sketchup and asked if I wanted to try it out. I enthusiastically said yes.
I thought it would be pretty easy for me to pick up when I started but it was not. After the first night of playing around with Sketchup and trying to make a solid model off a picture I ended up frustrated and in a bad mood. M was super nice about it and said if I didn’t want to finish his project it would be okay. I thought I would’ve enjoyed the challenge of learning a new software and we were both surprised at how discouraged I was and how much I just wanted to give up. Sketchup is actually not like the other 3D CAD programs I have used in the past and I think that really took me by surprise as well.
M had wanted me to finish the model in one night so I was ready to call it quits when I didn’t get very far the first night. But the next morning when I woke up I was determined to finish his model just for my own sake, even if he couldn’t use it at all. Let me just say, the next couple of days were even more frustrating and I was cursing up a storm as I spent hours working on it. But by the last day as I was finishing it up I found myself starting to get the hang of it. And to be honest, it was kind of nice being somewhat productive at night and not just being a complete sloth after the kids went to bed. (I tried to work on it during the day when I thought the kids were preoccupied but that was a complete fail. As soon as I opened my laptop the kids would swarm like a moth to a flame. They would gather around me and ask a million and one questions. “What are you watching mommy? What are doing with daddy’s picture? Are you doing daddy’s work?”)
I was supposed to have finished the model on Wednesday night but I was a little late in delivering it and finally finished it Saturday night. And even better he was able to use my model for his project still! So the model is not perfect by any means and probably isn’t anything super awesome looking but it felt great to learn a new tool and to finish my first ever solid model on Sketchup. It really has been a long time since I’ve challenged myself like this and the feeling of accomplishment of teaching myself Sketchup and completing a project has been pretty nice.