In So Many Words

This week for Try This Tuesday at 5 Minutes for Special Needs, I am sharing more about how our summer has been and some of the challenges we have faced with regard to Michael’s progress. I hope you’ll take a moment to read it, especially as it will be my last one.

Yes, I am stepping down from the 5MFSN team. It has been a wonderful year (plus a little) since the site began, but I just feel the need to draw back from some of my commitments to focus more on my home and my family. I cannot express how amazing this experience has been and how blessed I am to have met so many amazing moms and dads of special needs children through that community.

Of course, I’ll still be commenting there and blogging here, and hope to be a bit more regular once school gets started at the end of the month. I just didn’t want to disappear from the site and have people wonder what happened to me!

This is the first chance I’ve had to post all weekend, although I am hoping to have a bit more time going forward. I have been looking over all of my various commitments and responsibilities since the beginning of the year to see how I could make life a little more sane for myself, and I think I am making a bit of progress.

What I’ve Accomplished So Far:

• I got all but two writing commitments finished and off my plate. I am very happy with the results so far but am not planning on taking on any more in the near future.
• I have said no to several opportunities within the last couple of weeks, even though they were good things and seemed interesting. I forced myself not to think that, because they were in the future, they wouldn’t really be that time-consuming, and to realize that when the time came I would be feeling just as stressed out as I have been.
• Last week I stopped a volunteer activity I had started, realizing that there are too many other things calling on my time and that I just couldn’t do it, even for a friend.
• And, the biggest one for me, I cut back my contribution to 5 Minutes for Special Needs from twice a week to once a week. Since my passion for sharing ideas and resources with others is what intrigued me about joining the team in the first place, my focus going forward will be on the Try This Tuesday column/meme.

For my last regularly scheduled Friday post at 5MFSN, I decided to honor some of my loyal commenters as part of the new Say It Forward Carnival from 5 Minutes for Mom. Although I’m not locking myself into anything, I think it’s a pretty neat idea and will probably participate in it here in the future. And I love the banner they made for it: