Exhale.

I've been wanting to blog for some time, but haven't been able to sit down and do it. I've had that restless feeling of wanting to write, as opposed to the dutiful feeling of having to write, but no block of time that I felt I could afford to put toward this soul-feeding, well-filling activity.

But here I am, and although I'm currently responsible for five children (my brother and his family are visiting this weekend, and I'm watching his two kids this afternoon) it feels nice to just sit and put fingers to keyboard for a while, without a deadline breathing down my neck.

The past 10 months have been insanely busy. I am forever saying how busy I am, but since September, it's been a whole new level of scheduling craziness. Teaching school, teaching at home, rehearsing my church choir, cantoring weekend and funeral masses and meeting eight writing deadlines every week has been a challenge. But the school year is over, my private teaching is on a summer schedule, and the writing has eased up a bit, too. No wonder I can sit here and think out loud, or rather, in print.

My project for the summer is to take better care of myself, and I'm off to a good start. I had lost nearly 15 pounds, using SparkPeople, last summer, and started gaining it back in October (about the time the writing ramped up.) I gained it all back, with interest, and realized last weekend that I was within 5 pounds of my full-term weight when I was pregnant with Abby.

That was a wakeup call.

On Monday, I started using SparkPeople again, and decided that this was going to be the summer I prioritized taking care of myself. So far it's been pretty good -- I took a walk with a friend one day, another by myself the next, and have been to the gym three times, too. I'm not eating perfectly but am doing much better than I was. It feels good to place some importance on taking care of my own well-being, after such a long time of being too busy to put any time into it.

Health-conscious individuals might argue that there's no such thing as being "too busy" to take care of oneself, but they don't get it. That kind of pontificating does nothing to alleviate the problem and only creates guilt in people, like me, who go into what I call "survival mode" in order to just get through the days and weeks. People have to set priorities in order to manage their lives, and my priorities have necessarily been elsewhere for the better part of a year.

And now, without guilt or regret, I'm adjusting my priorities. To be able to do that is another blessing.