Balancing Our Time

Finding balance is important to me,  whether it's balancing people's needs, balancing what's important to us or balancing time. Finding the right amount of anything can sometimes be tricky. With the beginning of the school year has come an onslaught of new activities. There are more possibilities of things to do than we have time for or choose to have time for.

We value a slow paced life. We don't want to rush through life, we want to have breathing room. Space. 

Space to think.

To play.

To create

And to learn....

that mosquitoe larvae breath through tubes in their butts. 

And so, we make room for all our various church responsibilities, for cheerleading and gymnastics, for park days, library time and a field trip or two. These things are important to us. However, down time is equally important - having large chunks of time to dive into a project, explore a new idea or just be. When we add things to our schedule we take our time doing them. If there's not time to go slow, we're trying to do too many things. 

Because It's been awhile since I've posted pictures of butterflies. 

Xury was enthralled with the "adorable" cockroaches....

and the awesome garbage eating mealworms. We didn't know bugs could eat styrofoam!

I was obsessed with these amazing chrysalises.

This is the Orange Spotted Clearwing chrysalis. And, I think, this may be the Orange Spotted Clearwing butterfly.

I think, right now, we've reached just about the maximum amount of stuff we want to cram into our days. We'll see. If the scales start tipping towards stress and exhaustion, it will be time to reevaluate and make time for space.