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Friday, February 27, 2009

Our Attachment Journey: Part 5- Team Effort



Today I wanted to take time to highlight my husband.(I LOVE YOU DUSTIN!) I would be remiss not to acknowledge him at this point.

Dustin is doing his own work with Jonas to promote attachment and it's exciting watch him succeed. It's truly a team effort. While there are always tense moments to be had when we are working together to parent under such emotionally charged (and sleep deprived) circumstances we've really pulled together during this time.

One thing which has worked well for us is to have strategy sessions where we'll talk over what we're doing, analyze its effectiveness and work out a plan moving forward. We use the sessions to tell each other the little occurrences that may have been overlooked in the busyness of each other's day. I value our conversations because I've found clarity often comes to me by reexamining events after some time has passed. It's helps give me time to sort through the emotions and allows me to better ponder the behaviours themselves and what might me motivating them. Sometimes just recounting the details to him helps straighten out my thoughts. Because Jonas basically communicates to us non-verbally my husband's superior ability to read body language has helped me immensely. If I didn't have him to share his insights I'd be missing a lot!

One thing I've decided I am going to do is take some "me time" more regularly. I'm blocking out time on my calendar to spend alone or with friends. I'm also trying to make it easy for Dustin to have his time too, by suggesting he call a friend, etc. I know that I can help him to feel more free to go out by keeping his To Do List short and letting him know which things are a priority and which things I can wait for. Neither of us have ever been good about building relaxation into our schedule but at this point we need to learn to make it a priority. We have a lot of stress in our lives between our business and home. If we don't want to drain our reserves we need to recharge regularly.

Prioritizing fun/relaxation time is something I will really be working on moving forward. You can check back in a month or so to see how I'm doing with that. I'd love my readers to share their advice! Are you good at taking your own "me time?" How do you arrange your schedule to fit it in? In light of these economic times I'd enjoy hearing what you do to keep costs down for dates and de-stressing activities.

3 comments:

E said...

I SO need that time and going for a jog is how I get it! Not living close to my biggest support (our families), I have found that running is huge for my emotional and spiritual health...not to mention the physical, of course. You can tell whether I've had my run or not!

I'm still working on this and trying to meet some of my goals in the coming two months. I've cut out facebook and my own blog for a little while to carve out the time to do it! We'll see how that goes! I'm very goal-oriented and simply "relaxing" is really stressful for me. So...I spend my "me" time running (this is my very best time for reflection, meditation, etc.) and hopefully I'll start making progress on some of my other goals a little bit each evening.

Thanks again for sharing this journey. I'd love to hear how attachment is going with Dustin & Jonas. Abel bonded with Kevin first and their relationship seems more straightforward. Though it's more complicated than Eben's relationship with Abel, I think not having several males in & out of his life helped him with initially bonding and then attaching to his daddy. He's a serious mama's boy now, but he's always liked/then loved his daddy...and in the early days when he was busy rejecting me, he accepted Kevin much more readily. Abel has a certain knack for giving dirty looks (though never to us anymore, but occasional to a stranger...though he's usually only to happy to offer a big smile). I'll never forget all the ornery "get away from me, I don't like you, lady" looks he gave me for a while there. ;) Man, have times ever changed!

Erica

Kathleen said...

What a wonderful, intentional plan to work from the same page! The unity alone will pay off in huge dividends.

You go girl!

Anonymous said...

We really would love to have the kids over so you guys can have a date out.