December 4, 2022

WHOOPS! Anyone notice that I’ve been awol the past two-and-a-half weeks?! Yeah, that’s right, I’m on a major “whoops” with this project. 

It all started with a long weekend trip to stay with friends at their corporate beach house. I know that I successfully maintained my habits during our summer vacations this year, but this time was different. I didn’t have a lot of down time to consider my habits while at the beach house. I think that I still adhered to most of the habits by default (helping out around the house, cleaning up dishes, etc.), but I just didn’t track it at all. 

Then, my daughters and I all left the beach house with the flu, courtesy of our hosts. It was the sickest any of us had been in years, and the first time I’d ever been that sick with both daughters struggling at the same time. My youngest was delirious and hallucinating, keeping me up all night with her panic about the loud roar that she kept hearing, crying that “you’re the only mom I have,” and wishing she would die so she wouldn’t have to feel this bad anymore. Needless to say, decluttering and washing my face fell by the wayside. We postponed hosting Thanksgiving.

Next, my husband, who had thus far been spared, got the flu worse than any of us. He couldn’t sleep at night because of all the coughing, and his fever topped 104. Thanksgiving: canceled. I took over all the morning duties getting the girls ready for school, which, if you know anything about me, you know that I’m like a vampire when it comes to the early morning. It practically turns me to stone to see the light of day before 9am. At the very least, it makes me grumpy. My husband had to opt out of going to an important client interview that was a good opportunity for him at his job. Our kitchen counter turned into a mini-pharmacy with all the products he turned to, in desperation to get better in time for the interview, for nought.

Finally, I tried to start my habits back up, but then threw up my hands and gave myself an additional week off. There are no hard and fast rules for this project, so I’m allowed. I’ve taken a short sabbatical, but guess what? I’m back at it this week, still motivated to continue on. I updated my tracker to effectively negate these past two weeks, and will start my week 20 habit (take medicine) two weeks later than planned. In the end, my 52-week project will last 54 weeks. If you think this makes the project a failure, on the contrary, I’m rather proud that it survived this 18-day hiatus.

During this time, all hell did not break loose, as you may have thought. I may not have been tracking progress as usual, and certain habits did fall off, but others were maintained. As a result, the house stayed in decent shape, and I continued to lose weight (albeit only a tad – we did still have a Thanksgiving feast, even if the party was canceled). 

I’ll let you know how it goes.