Thank you Malt-O-Meal for sponsoring this post. Head to the Malt-O-Meal cereal Facebook page to learn more about a chance to win one of 60 $500 gifts, personalized just for you!!
One day life was going along routinely, the next…we’re living in quarantine? And we’re tasked to homeschool our children. Even as two former teachers, having everyone at home while trying to manage our business AND ensure our children were still being educated has required major adjustments. And when you add in the challenge of reinventing ways to practice self-care as overwhelmed and overworked adults, well, it can be a lot to handle! Putting everyone under the same roof all day long makes it tough to get a few seconds of time for yourself, where you can adequately recharge and decompress. It feels downright impossible.
Thanks to quarantine, our routines drastically shifted and we struggled to make everything work well. With a few adjustments and a slight mental shift, we were able to find some creative ways to fit self-care into our daily quarantined lives.
Here what we have learned:
- Find humor in the situation, don’t take everything so seriously.
- Embrace the mundane. Reframe your perspective, the situation is temporary. Instead of feeling trapped with children for hours on end, look at it as an opportunity to spend quality time together that you otherwise probably wouldn’t.
- Get creative. Spice up your kids’ day with the unexpected. A fun lunch or a game after dinner can really make their day. It’s the little things they will remember.
- Throw perfection out of the window! When the weight of doing everything feels too heavy, do your best, but let things slide too. If skipping a Zoom homeschool lesson feels good for everyone, do it.
- Parenting, especially under quarantine, is a daily work in progress. Give yourself some grace when you ask yourself, “Did I just say that outloud?”
- Give everyone in your family to space to feel whatever it is that they are feeling in the moment. It will be a mess, it will be uncomfortable, but the feelings are real. Name it and experience it and reframe your expectations (Thanks Brene Brown!)
The most challenging piece having everyone at home full-time was finding a way to rejuvenate ourselves as adults. We are under increased stress in an unprecedented time. In times like these, taking care of ourselves becomes even more of a challenge but more important now than ever. Living under the same roof, managing schedules and workloads are a lot to juggle at the same time. So how can you practice self-care in these circumstances?
Simple Ways to Practice Self-Care Under Quarantine:
- Find simple indulgences that you love. For us, cereal we love, like Malt-O-Meal (MOM) cereal, is a simple way to spoil ourselves, because they are less spendy and amazingly tasty!
- Get up 15 minutes before everyone else in your household, to drink coffee, sit outside, or do whatever makes you happy.
- Throw on some headphones and go for a walk.
- Turn on a show for your kids and workout.
- After bedtime, sit on the patio and Facetime a friend.
- Read a book that you’ve been wanting to read but have been putting off.
- Call a friend or family member that you haven’t chatted with in a while. Reconnecting is good for the soul.
- Pick flowers from your yard to garnish your kitchen.
- Write down 3 things you did well today on a sticky note. Put it near your sink or bathroom mirror. The next day when you wake up, you can reflect on that even when you feel less than adequate some days, you’re actually doing an amazing job!
We are living in an environment right now that no one really knows how to navigate. It requires patience, flexibility, and creativity. Self-care might be the last thing on the agenda of a busy parent, but it is more important now than ever before. If we can’t take care of our own needs it will be difficult to manage everything thrown at us along the way.
To honor all of the hard working moms across of the country right now, Malt-O-Meal is giving away $30,000 worth of personalized gifts to moms (two $500 gifts each day for 30 days), plus cereal for each winner’s pantry, via a social content on the brand’s Facebook page now through June 25.
