At the beginning of the new year, I wrote a post with a few goals I wanted to accomplish. It's my version of a "New Year's Resolution." Well, Unfortunately for most people, 2020 has turned out to be one terrible year. You can read about my take on the terrible twos here, more for comedic relief than real talk.
A whole six months has gone by. I can't tell you half of what I did in these six months, But I know the time has gone by because:
- I'm not pregnant anymore
- I have a second child
- There are more gray hairs on my head (I think...I'm not really counting...)
I started the year with three general "goals" I wanted to accomplish.
- Finish my cross-stitch
- Find a new work-life balance
- Keep my sanity
1. Finish My Cross-Stitch
I did! I finished my cross-stitch. I put in extra hours early this year, stitching at night, but I didn’t finish it before he was born. Somehow, after my son was born, I found time here and there to finish! It took me about three and a half years, but I finished it on June 28, 2020. This is my second large-scale cross-stitch that I've finished. Once again, the irony is that when I purchased this cross-stitch, I was living in China and single. When I finished it, I was living in the USA, married, with two kids two and under.
Originally, I bought this cross-stitch with a goal of finishing it before we had kids. That didn't happen. So then, I wanted to finish it before we were done having kids. That didn't happen either...but to my own credit, I only missed that goal by about three months.
Here it is!
Something often overlooked about cross-stitches is actually the back. If you enter a cross-stitch into a county fair or contest, they actually judge you more on the back than the front. Why is that? The back tells about the journey. Anyone can come up with a nice looking design on the front, but it takes dedication and patience to have a beautiful cross-stitch back.
So what is it about this journey that's so important?
- No Knots - cross stitching doesn't involve tying any knots. The ends of each thread are secured by looping your stitches on top of the ends. Every time you start a new thread, it must be secured in this way.
- Reaching over vs. starting new - I don't know if there's a technical term for this. If anyone's savvy enough in cross-stitch terminology, please let me know! But this is where instead of cutting the thread and starting in a new location, you take your thread from your last ending point and reach across the canvas to start it in a new location, therefore resulting in a very long piece of thread traveling on the back. It makes the back look messy and sloppy.
- Consistency - The Xs on the front need to be crossed the exact same way in order to appear consistent and neat. This means if you stitch the bottom left to top right first, it has to be stitched first on every single X. When done correctly, the stitches on the back will all appear to be in the same direction instead of alternating vertical and horizontal stitches.
Is it obvious to tell if someone's taken their time and cross-stitched the correct way? Yes. If you know what you're looking for, it's extremely obvious. One of the most telling signs is that the back of your cross-stitch should look exactly like the front.
Here's my back:
I have to say, I did a really nice job on this cross-stitch. I've been sloppy on previous ones in the past and learned the hard way, hence how I've been able to come up with my mental list of "what it takes to have a good cross-stitch." The design itself is not a difficult one, especially not compared to the last one I finished, but it fits perfectly for why I wanted to finish it: it's for my children.
2. Find a New Work-Life Balance.
I have been able to find a new work-life balance. In doing so, I've cut my students in half, I limit the hours I work, and I'm only teaching online right now. For most of this, I have to thank coronavirus actually. If the virus didn't exist, I would have pressured myself into taking all my students back which would be 12+ hours of teaching a week in five days. Add that onto taking care of my kids during the day while my husband was working as well as breastfeeding, or attempting to breastfeed my son, and that results in one crazy mom.
I'll never forget the day I put my pump on the kitchen counter and pumped during my 30 minute break in between two lessons while cooking spaghetti on the stove for dinner at the same time after my daughter was born. I don't even know where she was. I think my husband was watching her.
I'll be eternally grateful for coronavirus that I will not have to do that with my son this time around. But that's pretty much the only reason why I'm grateful for this virus. For everything else, it's ruined a lot of plans, trips, outings, and life in general.
3. Keep my Sanity
As mentioned above, this virus has helped me to keep my sanity in certain ways. In others? Not so much. It's been a new learning curve to figure out how to plan grocery trips now and be intentional about what I buy. I've had to train my daughter into a daily routine/schedule that doesn't involve going on playdates or wandering stores for fun. But we've found other things that she has enjoyed during these last three months of staying at home and staying out of public places, which has also kept us from going crazy ourselves: going on bike rides in the bike trailer, swinging in our front lawn and "blasting off", swinging in our hammock, watching our neighbors mow and trim their lawns, going swimming in our neighbor's pool, watching bunnies and squirrels, digging in our flower beds which don't have flowers, and learning how to be a big sister, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Overall, I think the transition to having two kids while maintaining both of our jobs and general lifestyle has been pretty smooth. The kids have kept me busy during all this staying at home, and to be honest, it's been nice. I wonder to myself what quarantine with no kids would have been like. I think I would have had a lot more time to do the things I wanted to do and no will to do them. Chances are, I would have sat at home, watched a lot of TV, or spent a lot of money shopping online, neither of which I have time to do now.
I hope despite all the terribleness this year has brought for many of us, you've been able to find some silver linings to reach some goals or discover something new for yourself.
Here's to the second half of 2020.
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