15 days until Christmas, and Hanukkah is almost over! Can you feel the stress revving up? Places to go, parties to attend, shopping to do, all while keeping up with the already packed schedule, whew! I’m determined to enjoy the holidays, and stress is a real joy killer. For me the key question is to ask myself, “What’s the point?” It helps keep my perspective clear and the end goal in focus. There are so many expectations around this time of the year, it’s also important for me to remember that good? Is good enough.

This year was the first year our Christmas picture wasn’t a hassle. Getting three kids to sit still, look at the camera, and smile– it’s a little like giving ferrets crack, and then teaching them how to eat with a fork. It usually ends up with about 18,000 unusable photos and me yelling SMILE G*D DAMMIT! Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too. But this year was different. The point of the Christmas picture is to have a good memory, and to get the darn thing done. So we dressed the kids up, went to the mall where they give carriage rides, I yelled smile (in a nice way) and snapped a few pics. No, they’re not great photos, but the goal was accomplished.
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Recently we’ve cut the amount of TV our kids are watching to one show a day. So far this has been a boon to our family, except for one problem.
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As a follow up to what our dreams are, career and otherwise, there’s a follow up question I’ve been kicking around: What’s holding you back from realizing your dreams, and achieving your goals?

I think in in the overwhelming majority of cases, problems don’t arise from external obstacles but from fear. A while ago I was reading the “10 Money Questions” feature at Blogher, and was struck by a comment that Dayana Yochim made about women’s attitudes toward making investments and accumulating wealth. She said that women are often more risk averse, and their decisions are filtered through fear.
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I hate to start the week off on a sour note, but I’m not having a good Monday. I’m having the worst bought of PMS in my life. My son is sick for the second time this month, and he gets asthma when he’s sick, so it’s an added worry for me. I’d like nothing more than to huddle under the blankets with him today, but I have deadlines to meet. Working when my kids are sick is still a foreign concept to me, and just feels wrong.

And yet, this is the week of Thanksgiving, for those of us living in the US. I’ve been thinking about being thankful a lot lately.
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Friday my kids were off school, and I took them to the mall to buy Emily, my nine-year-old, some much needed winter clothes. I got two hundred bucks out of the ATM, She looked at me, and I swear I could see the cartoon dollar signs in her eyes.

“You have two hundred dollars! How come you’re always telling me you don’t have any money?!”

“I don’t tell you that I don’t have any money, I tell you I don’t have money for the Webkinz, or the CD, or the poster that you’re asking me for at the moment. We have money, but we only have a certain amount of ‘fun money.’”

“How come all my friends have more fun money than I do?”

“I don’t know, probably because most of your friends’ parents both work full time, and I only work part time.”

“You should go back to teaching! You should get a full-time job! Then I could get a cell phone!”

“True, if I went back to work full time, we’d have a lot more fun money. But you still wouldn’t get a cell phone, because in our family, no kid under 14 needs a cell phone. Also, Will would have to go to full-time school, and I don’t think he’d be very happy. ”

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Recently a friend and I were talking about getting our careers off the ground. She was telling me what her dreams were, and asked me,

“What are your career dreams?”

“Hmm,” I replied. “I don’t think I really have any.”

“But when you have some time just to think about the future, what do you fantasize about?

“I don’t fantasize.”

“Never?” She asked, aghast.

“Not really.”

“I guess you analyze, instead right?”

“Yeah, that’s more on par with my temperament, I guess.”

I don’t know about other cultures, but in the US, having a dream is an integral part of being an American, as baseball. From the pioneers to Pinocchio, we’re inundated with having a dream and making that dream come true. We’re told that we can make our dreams happen, and that hanging onto that dream can help us in times of adversity.

I was reading an article over at Freelance Switch about 8 practices of a long term freelancer, and number 6 is “practice your dream.” Yep, there’s that concept again. It’s something every self help book, and business success guru promotes: purusing your vision, following your dream, forecast your future.

From the perspective of someone who barely has a drop of visionary blood in her veins, it’s an interesting concept to ponder. Maybe I just define it differently. In other words, maybe I have dreams, but they’re sort of disguised in a different format. I have things I want, of course, but I don’t know that they’d qualify as “dreams.” But it’s an idea I’m fascinated by.

So, let’s talk about it in the comments. What does the word “dream” mean to you? Can you recommend any books that have helped you target your dreams? What are your dreams– career or otherwise? How did you find them? Do you pick dreams you know are attainable, or do you let your imagination soar? I’d love to hear them.

I promised to let you know what the results were regarding how much leisure time I’m spending on the internet. Every time I paused in the midst of work, or spent time in my off hours surfing the internet, I timed it. My results weren’t exactly accurate, because I’d get up to do something else and leave the timer running for an two hours, or press “stop” instead of pause, and erase time accrued, but! As near as I can tell I spend about 2.5 hours a day on the net for leisure. Not too bad ( I can partially justify it because I so rarely watch TV), but not great either.

But I realized this week, it’s not just me. As a family, we spend more time with technology than we do with each other. Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. If I’m not on the computer, my kids are. Or Aaron’s working on his laptop. If the kids aren’t watching TV, then Aaron is. And if it’s not the TV or the computer, it’s the iPod, or the Gameboy, ad infinitum. I don’t mean we spend all our time in front of something that requires electricity; we are a one-TV, one-computer family (excluding Aaron’s work laptop). We love to read, my kids have tons of friends in the neighborhood, but we do spend more time than is… optimal, I think.

Aaron and I were talking about it this weekend. As our kids get older they’re going to have more stuff to do and more places to go. That’s great, but I want to make sure we stay connected. So we decided that Saturday is going to technology free. I’ll try to plan a craft or something fun to do at home. We’ll read, play games, go sight seeing, and we’ll shut technology out for a day. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be very much fun for any of us in the beginning. It’s a discipline not to have instant information, instant communication, instant entertainment. But I do think that once we get used to it, we’ll really have fun together. I’ll let you know how it goes. I tend to start with a bang and end with a whimper, but even if it’s only a temporary thing I’m interested to see who I am, who we are, without HBO and AOL. At least for one day a week.

A while ago I wrote about my dilemma concerning Will not wanting to go to school full time. I ended up drastically reducing his school time, and now he goes to school three mornings a week. Two of those mornings I go to class, and one morning I volunteer in my daughers’ classes. Leaving me exactly zero minutes sans kid to get work done, or canvas for work. Needless to say, this isn’t what I imagined when I decided to freelance.

Next year he’ll be going to school half days, everyday, which doesn’t give me a whole heck of a lot more time to work on developing a client base, or to take all the money I’m making, spread out on the bed, and roll around in it, as I imagined I’d be doing in a year. Okay, maybe I’m a little more realistic than that, but I did think that I would have more than 9 freaking hours a week to devote to work, without hearing SpongBob in the background.

I don’t really know what to do. I’m sort of an all or nothing person, and it’s hard for me to say, sure, maybe I won’t have much time to devote to getting a business going this year, and maybe not much more time next year, but boy, come 2010, I’m all over it! I suppose I could think of it as a part time gig. There’s no shame in that, right? The reality is, that’s what it’s shaping up to be, no matter what delusions of grandeur I had in the beginning. When I first started out, I thought I’d start work right after the girls got on the bus at 7:00, and Aaron could get Will dressed and take him to school, so I’d have 7.5 beautiful, pristine, uninterrupted hours to work. I’d make 60 cold calls a week, heck, in a couple of years, I could be pulling in as much as my husband. Or not.

Maybe I need to look into hiring a mother’s helper. Can anyone give me any tips on websites or other resources I can use in finding some in home care? And how well does in home care really work, if mom is in the next room? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Yesterday as I sat banging my head working in front of the computer, my son and his friend from next door walked through the house.

“Will?” I heard her ask, “Why is your mom always in front of the computer now?”

“I don’t know, ” he replied. “She works on the computer now, so she always has to be on there. I don’t know what she does.”

“It’s weird, because now, whenever I come over, she’s always sitting there.”

Out of the mouths of babes.
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I never thought I’d say this, but I’m tired of sitting on my butt. Yesterday I worked on a particularly arduous project. I sat down at the computer in the morning, took a couple of bathroom breaks, ate my lunch sitting at my desk, picked up my son from preschool, fixed my kids an after-school snack, and otherwise did not escape my chair until 5:30. When I taught school I rarely sat down, so this all sitting, all the time business is for the birds. (The birds stricken lame by polio. You know, those birds.)

I guess I need to schedule breaks, which is weird, because I’m all about the breaks, but when I’m working on a design I MUST sit there and compulsively tweak it, until it looks right. Yesterday, I didn’t think the design I was working on would be so uncooperative. I kept telling myself, just a few more minutes, and then I’ll go do something else. That happens more than I’d like.

One of the problems is that I like to spend my breaks in front of the computer, checking email, reading blogs, or Twittering. I’ve cut my blog reading, by about 95%. So I guess if I can break that habit, I can actually get up from the computer every once in a while. And do what, I’m not sure. Baton twirling? 2 minute yoga? I know! I’ll eat my lunch standing over the sink! Seriously though, my treadmill is three steps from my desk, I could walk for 4 minutes a few times a day. I could also poke myself with something sharp, which is one step up from exercise, in my book. One thing I’ve been doing right is making myself exercise for 30 minutes everyday. I hate all 1800 seconds of it, but I do it, and I can tell it’s doing some good.

Another problem is that my posture is horrible. That woman up there? That’s exactly how I sit. Only my eyes are open– most of the time. Part of it’s not my fault, because I’m super short (so short cropped pants are regular length on me) so I can’t lean back in my chair, but I guess I could exert the effort to walk over to my couch and get a pillow to support my back. Ppfft, whatever. I keep hearing about RSI, and I guess it’s something I need to pay attention to. I read a recommendation for Workrave, a free ap that “alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.” It just seems so counterintuitive to have my computer tell me to stop working, but I may give it a try. And I probably need to have my mother phone me a few times a day, and tell me not to slouch.