Reply to I’m a recovering (fill in the blank)

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "I’m a recovering (fill in the blank)"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Super anxious person!

My whole life, really, but I've made major strides in the last 10 years (I'm 41) and new people I befriends are surprised to hear about my anxiety.

Having three kids really helped. Perfection is impossible, so you might as well just enjoy the chaos![/quote]

What are your coping strategies? Kids have made me more anxious :([/quote]

PP here.

1) Get enough sleep. For me, that's number 1. We sleep train early and don't mess around about it. Outside of when a kid is sick, we don't parent from 8pm to 7:30am. When I was pregnant with #3 I had a self imposed, very strict 10pm bedtime and slept 10:30pm-7:30am nearly every single night.

2) Get space. We each take a chunk of time each weekend "off" from parenting duties, plus two weeknights a month.

3) Routines, routines, routines. We know what to expect, the kids know what to expect. Get home, shoes off, hands washed. Before dinner, chores, after dinner, clean up toys. Standard morning routine. Standard bedtime routine. Etc, etc.

4) Never plan to just hang out at the house for more than 3 hours unless friends are coming over. Otherwise, get out and go somewhere, even if it's just the park.

5) Equal partner spouse. In fact, this should prob be #1.

I think honestly though, a lot of it is your "type" of anxiety. If you're someone who always worries about bad things happening, kids are going to make that worse, not better, I would think, since the stakes are higher. But for someone like me, who has a STRONG perfectionist bent, it's been great, because sometime early in the life of kid #2, I needed to accept that perfection was not possible. I can't get every kid exactly what they need all the time, it's not possible. Sometimes one kid needs snuggling and one kid needs her butt wiped and one kid needs quality playtime with mama and guess what? I can't do all three things at once! So you triage, and you get used to needs not being perfectly met and you realize it's totally worth it because you've got three amazing kids and they have each other. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics