"If you can't say something nice about yourself...practise"

I'm a huge advocate of positivity, not being too hard on yourself and taking it easy....except when it comes to myself. With myself I strive her perfection, and when I don't get it, I get pissed. As you can imagine, that happens often, daily in fact and the little dickhead inside my brain tells me how much of a failure I am.

Recently I've been chatting inside my head to myself about how lazy I've been with doing special things with my girls and I've been crap at taking photos of them. Today, little Miss Willow has been very kind and slept a lot, and Leah has been happy to play while I work on the girl's yearly photo books. Before starting work on each book I've skipped through the pages prior, and seen what they've done in the past 6 months or so, and figured that I haven't been that super bad...there's actually a lot of stuff we've done, and clearly, a lot of photos taken - lovely ones at that!

So today I give a big middle finger to my inner monologue, cuz self - you're a super dick sometimes.

Here's the books if you're keen on a geeze. Enjoy xox

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"You don't have to wait to love yourself"

I think it might be Term burn out, but I've been feeling really euck over the past few weeks, only just starting to feel better now. It's not even necessarily an outward thing and most people wouldn't even know it's going on, but on the insideI've convinced myself that I'm not doing enough, am hopeless at being a mother, at teaching and that I need to sort myself out to be worth anything.

I get peaks and troughs of these feelings and I couldn't exactly say why - possibly stress or doing too much int he first place. I think most of mine stems from my expectations of myself. When I'm at that point it's like there's a rain cloud over me all day, every day and even when I make a conscious effort to be happy I'm aware that really I'm not. It makes the moments like these when I'm feeling better seem like a technicolour of sky in comparison. I feel energetic, motivated and...happy. 

So, to begin the Love Yourself Challenge this week I was asked to list 5 ways that I can love myself better. Here they are. I may not be able to stick to them all the time, but I at least hope to keep myself mindful of them.