And here we are at the end of March. As this is posted, I am sitting in my third dance competition in three weeks. April will only be slightly less insane. ‘Tis the season for craziness!

Good memories:

• Holly’s dance team rocking it this year in spite of the girls being extremely sick
• Connor making it to the state forensics meet next month
• Buffy’s 20th anniversary (sob!)
• Booking our summer vacation
• Receiving Connor’s graduation announcements…

Bookish stuff:

• Total number of books read: 12 (I have NO idea how this happened)
• Total number of pages: 3,792 plus two audiobooks for sixteen hours of reading
• Favorite book(s) read: SO many good books this month. It’s a close tie between The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley and The Women in the Castle

Favorites:

• Recipes:
  • Confession – I cooked almost nothing this month. Jim has been taking on the brunt of grocery shopping and therefore cooking since I’ve been with Holly almost every weekend. Maybe that is how I got in so much reading…
• Song:
  • Feminist AF. I am fervently hoping one of Holly’s dance instructors will choreograph a song to this one next year.
• Skincare
  • 
  • These are weird little things but after one use, I was a complete convert. They absorb the infection overnight so that when you take it off, the swelling and the pimple are essentially gone. They don’t prevent breakouts, but they definitely make breakouts less noticeable, painful, and annoying.

How did I persevere?

• Meditation: Grade F – I only practiced meditating two days this month. I wish I had an excuse. The desire is there, but I tend to forget about it in the course of a day and only remember when I am busy doing something else. The goal for April will be to make this a priority.
• Healthy Habits: Grade D – I fell off the bandwagon hard this month. I had some issues attending CrossFit – my knees hurt, I had a migraine, I was sick, etc. – that sounded like perfectly legitimate reasons not to go at the time. Looking back on it, they were nothing but excuses. Even yesterday, I failed to get up and go work out, and I really had no good reason other than I knew it was going to be a late night thanks to dance and wanted to be alert for dance. Stupid. I need to get out of this excuse mentality and buckle down. I also stopped logging my food because it was making me feel guilty and wasn’t curbing what I ate at all. The only good thing that I have been doing is a company-wide healthy habits competition. It will last six weeks, so hopefully it will add the necessary fuel I need to get off my butt and stop making excuses.
• Political Activism: Grade C – I have definitely stopped making phone calls to my senators and representatives. I will confess that having the Speaker as my representative is frustrating because the entire country knows he does not listen to his constituents. It makes any phone calls I want to make seem futile. To make matters worse, the one Republican senator for the state keeps sending out responses to my calls and emails that are nothing more than dismissals. “I appreciate your comments but here is why you are wrong and here is why I will be voting in opposition of what you want.” These responses are infuriatingly smug and again makes any effort on my part seem like a waste of time.  I still am donating every month to about ten different organizations, and I can do online petitions like there is no tomorrow so I haven’t stopped resisting completely. Still, I feel somewhat guilty that I am not doing as much as I possibly can. Goodness knows we need it.

So, not a great month for persevering but a fantastic month for reading and everything else. Let’s see if April will bring nothing but showers!