February 2019 – End of Month Review

• $1037.51 on credit card #10
• Major Decluttering
• Work on this site
• Cook More
• Health and Dental

We paid the $1,037.51 on our credit card. We have $1,500 left until it is paid off. I’m so excited to be done with this!

This month was very weird. I was starting to feel a little burned out with life. I was at that point where I was working harder and getting less out of it. I felt like I was always going, going, going and not reaching my destination. I was being pulled in so many directions all the time. I’m a mother of three, a wife, a nurse, and a blogger. We are on our debt-free journey and we are preparing for long-term travel starting in 2020. I felt like I had too many balls in the air. I decided I needed a mental break from everything I could avoid. I wasn’t on social media much. I didn’t blog. I didn’t think about anything in the future past dinner each day. I didn’t work on anything that I didn’t have to. I used our basic budget and didn’t update anything. I set aside travel planning and the endless to do list that is my life right now. We did continue to work on the house this month. We didn’t do nearly as much as we had originally planned. We did what we wanted to when the energy struck. Honestly, I spent most of this month hanging out with my kids, playing video games (mostly Skyrim), reading books, drinking coffee, cooking, and lounging on the sofa way too much. I didn’t work on this site. I did cook a lot more.

Michael has a follow-up for his back in a couple of weeks. He is starting to feel better but still has trouble sitting for more than a half an hour or so. We are hopeful that he will continue to get better. He has lost almost 30 pounds in the last couple months which has really helped.

The girls had their dental checkups and everything went great.

I am hoping to find more balance going forward. I need to give myself more time to relax and set a time of day that I need to stop working on everything everyday. The problem with blogging and social media is that you could be working on something 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The problem with being a planner and having something as massive as long-term travel with three kids ahead of you is that you have a million small decisions to make. The research alone was a large part of that mental burnout. I am trying to decide on so many things. Where do we want to go? Do we want to travel in an RV? Camper? SUV? Van? What vaccinations do we need? When should we get our passports in order? International driver license? What does the dog need? Where can we take him? What about school? Homeschool? Online? Roadschooling? There are homeschooling styles? Which one is which? We need to massively declutter our belongings. What do I do with all this stuff? Where should we rent a storage unit? Safety deposit box? P.O. box or mail service? How do we store our photos? Should we scan them? Which scanner should we buy? Should we do suitcases or backpacks? What should we take with us? One thing will lead to another and another and another until my head is spinning with the amount of decisions I have to make. I have set a few boundaries going forward that I hope will keep me from burning myself out again. Hopefully, y’all will see a whole lot more of me.