Quieting : Days 2 and 3

It's morning of Day 3 of quieting the input.

Yesterday was a great day.  Tucker was off from school and we spent the morning with a friend and her children as they helped me finish up more wood photos for my church (we made them all reversible... and this project is now put to bed!).  We came home, had a nice rest time slash nap time all afternoon, had only a mildly stressful dinner, then Dave and I watched a movie after putting the kids to bed.  Just the fact that we watched a movie... that is an indication that the quieting is impacting lots of things.  I don't watch a lot of movies at home.  I either fall asleep or I am busy doing other things at that time of night.  Well, I do watch some TV after bed time... but not that often recently.

So, we were feeling particularly leisurely and used the on-demand feature of our cable to rent Tower Heist.  It was okay.  We mostly wanted to see it because it was filmed over Thanksgiving 2010 at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which I attended, and there were scenes of the Purdue Band in it.  I made Dave pause the movie a lot so I could see if any one from my family was in it.  I mean, I was, like, 50 people back from the street for the parade, but my mom and Tucker managed to sneak up front.  Anyhow, none of us made it the movie.  Drat.

A few thoughts, almost three full days of quieting::

• I have unsubscribed from more and more and more emails.  I get a great gratification from this.  Some of these emails announce sales (Hello, Loft, if you have sales every day, maybe you should just lower your prices to be honest about it all.), some are blogs that I used to follow, and some are updates from our 401K, and other business related items.  The beauty of the internet is that if I really need that information, I can go look it up!  It won't be hard to discover if Children's Place is having a sale at the time that I actually need to go buy kids' clothes.  I know....  I'll miss some great sales or events or blog posts.  I am okay with that.

• Now that my email inbox is getting sparse, it actually is a fun thing again to check my email.  I get a nice email from a friend maybe a few times a week, and since those emails aren't clogged up by junk, I can pay more attention to them.

• Being off Facebook has been interesting... I don't feel like I am missing out on anything, though, like I mentioned on Day 1, I have caught myself thinking in FB stati a few times.  This is disturbing to me.  It's not that I want to tell any one person about something cute my kid said.... it's not that I want to ask a certain person about an area they have expertise in.... I find myself wanting to just put that stuff out there and see what happens.  To me, this is a bit egomanical.  I don't like that I have become that way in the last five years of having a FB life.  

• Another way I am quieting ... I noticed that there is nothing scheduled on my calendar for next week until Saturday.  I decided to keep it that way.  Next week is a detox from over commitment and noise.  I am so excited.  Since I made that decision, though, I have had to turn down at least five activities that I wanted to be a part of.  Some of are one-time events and I am okay with missing them, even though they will be good.  The other activities are things that can happen later, such as scheduling dinner with friends, or a playdate for the kids.  

• I am making a bigger effort to either do without something that I "need" or I am shopping online for it.  In the past, I have been a big Amazon user, especially when I had free shipping via Amazon Mom.  But, they changed how they are doing it and I don't order from them much since I would have to have minimum order of $25 for free shipping.  I really do love having things arrive at my door, though, even if I have to wait a couple of days for it.  I decided it was worth it to compile a cart over time, instead of wasting my time running around.  This was important for right now, due to feeling so crazy and over stimulated.  So, this week, every time I thought of something I need, I added it to my Amazon cart and this morning placed my final order.  It was stuff like a food scale, two new spatulas, plastic freezer jars, and a book on simplifying.  :)  I was well over the $25 for free shipping.  And now, I can't wait for my package!

• One last way of gaining some peace this week... I am doing more thinking about how meal times can be simplified, while still adhering to my moderate levels of healthy standards.  :)  I did no research, no blog reading, no book reading.  That would have pushed me over my limits of quieting all the input!  So, it would be opposite of my goal of gaining peace.  Instead of researching, I thought about ideas I have used before, or things that my friends do to make meals simpler.  The few things on the list are enough to get me started with some good habits and once I have those under my belt, I can add new habits.