Early to Rise Challenge: Day 14

Tough day today.

It's not as bad as it looks - there's about twenty or so minutes missing for getting dressed, doing physical therapy, waddling downstairs and finding the camera.  I woke up at 5:58 or so, and then my alarm went off, I hit the reset button, and I quickly got sucked back down by the sheets.

Maybe it was the extra times I had to get up and use the bathroom last night.  Maybe it's because hauling myself out of bed is getting increasingly painful again - it tends to get worse the farther out I get from my last PT appointment (it's mostly massage to relieve some nerve pressure), and it doesn't help that I'm gaining weight steadily these last few weeks of the pregnancy.

But I think that mostly I haven't got a good plan for what the extra time is for.


Today's theme, appropriately enough, is "Find What Motivates You."  The two things I could really use extra, child-free time in the morning to accomplish are my quiet time and my baby blanket.  Sadly, I can really only squeeze out time for one of the two.  I just realistically don't have the energy for getting up any earlier.  And when I have to make the decision between quiet time and crocheting, it's really pretty simple to decide that time with God has to come first.

The problem I'm having lies in the realization I came to nearly two years ago that I have trouble generating motivation within myself if I don't see relatively permanent and/or tangible successes to keep my momentum going.  In other words, I need to do things that stay done for a prolonged period.  Quiet time and prayer, though they benefit me in other ways through the day, are by their very nature things that don't ever finish.

The rest of the day is an endless succession of appointments, meetings, studies, and crises.  For instance, today I had to spend all my free time crawling on my eight-month-pregnant belly under the computer desk to figure out why the modem suddenly stopped working (apparently the DSL cable just randomly died).  Except for crises, tomorrow is actually the first completely free day I've had in a long time.  I shall have to set aside some time to work on the blanket, even though it seems so unimportant, just to give my motivations a boost.  And maybe, barring catastrophe, get my spring veggie garden laid out.

Come to think of it, the Ides of March is probably an ironic time to hope for freedom from crises...