A Facebook friend challenged me to go vegan for Earth Day, and I decided that, since I'm already vegetarian (I eat eggs and dairy but no meat or fish), it wouldn't be much of a stretch for me to stay away from all animal products for the day.  It will be good for the Earth, and besides my doctor told me just yesterday that a lower fat, lower cholesterol diet couldn't hurt.

So I got up on this fine Earth Day, threw some clothes on and got my kids off to school.  As I was walking back inside, thinking with satisfaction about the nice vegan breakfast I had planned for myself, I looked down and realized that I had been thinking of going vegan strictly as making a dietary change and had forgotten that veganism encompasses all use of animal products, including those in clothing.  Here I was going vegan wearing very non-vegan leather shoes.  Hm.  And my other pair of shoes?  Also leather.  That's the entirety of my shoe collection: all leather.  I'm just not a big shoe person.  But that's ok, because my jacket, purse and clothes are all still plant based, right?  Oh.  Turns out I'm wearing wool.  Which is also not vegan.  On the other hand, the polyester I'm wearing is vegan, but still not a sustainable, Earth friendly fabric.

Ok, this is going to be harder than I thought.  So, forget the clothes.  I will not go vegan on the clothes.  I'll just stick to eating vegan.

So, I pop my wheat bread in the toaster and prepare to top it with my usual Nutella, only...  Noooo!  Nutella is not vegan.  It contains milk.  I have to go all day without Nutella?!  Seriously?  Fine, fine.  Peanut butter is vegan and so is jelly.  And while that begs for a cool glass of milk, I can go with a very vegan glass of ice water for today.  Whew!  So, I had a nice vegan breakfast of PB&J on wheat toast.  Only as I rethought things on the energy of a full stomach, I realized the bread has yeast and honey, which if you are going to be hardcore about it, are also not vegan.  Damn.  I have now failed breakfast and getting dressed.

Ok, fine.  Progress, not perfection.  I will not go hardcore vegan.  I will just do food, but I will only cut out eggs and dairy, not yeast and honey.  Ha!  By those standards, I am now passing with flying colors and the rest of today should be no problem.  As long as I can stay out of the Nutella.

Thank goodness Coke is vegan or I'd never make it through the rest of the day!  Oh, and if it's not, please, don't tell me.  I don't love the Earth that much.

I'll tell you, this is a tough time of year to try to fit in a day of spirituality. Or a day to write about a day of spirituality. It's a tough time of year to try to take a shower. (Yeah, I showered on Saturday. You got a problem with that? It's not like you all can see or smell me. And I'm courteous enough to do my shopping online too.)

When I started my spiritual experiment of setting one day a week aside as a personal Sabbath, I set up some rules for myself, which included things like not eating sugar and not using the computer. This week, I had to choose between sticking to the letter of the rules (but not meeting some of my holiday commitments) and (ahem!) bending the rules a bit.

In the end, I went with the bending and decided to focus on mindfulness.  I took things slowly.  I tried to pay attention.  Before I took action (especially if that action was, like using the computer, on my verboten list), I would pause and breathe and pray about it.  It led me to choose not to drink soda (although I tried to talk myself I'd never make it through the day without it) but to choose to use the computer to access some information about Christmas gifts (rather than employ an elaborate and vastly more time consuming work around).  It wasn't quite a day of rest, but it wasn't a day of insane, frenetic holiday preparation either.

Unfortunately, now I am in full frenetic holiday mode, complete with house guests, which is why this post is going up later than usual.  I'll be around here a bit more before the end of the year, but come January, my focus is totally going to be sleep!

Did you do anything this week? Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below. And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

After really struggling last week between my need to sleep and my desire not to sleep, I decided that this week on my day of spirituality I would spend one day throwing out my to do list and letting go of all the things I "should" do in favor of whatever came to me in the moment.

So after I got the kids off to school, I thought, "I should exercise, but I'd like to sit down and pet the cat and look out the window."  So I sat down with the cat and just relaxed.  Every now and then a thought would come to me and I'd worry about when I should get up or what I should do next.  I told myself that I would know when I knew.  And I sat petting the cat until I was done and it felt like time to go lie down and take a nap.  So I took a nap.  And when I woke up, I didn't quite want to get out of bed yet, so I stayed in bed, trying to trust that I would get up when the time was right.

And when my daughter was finished with school, she wanted to play outside.  So I went outside.  And as I stood there watching her play, I thought, "This day feels so much better than last week.  What if I lived every day this way?  Just doing the next right thing and trusting that I'd know when to do it..."  Which I followed immediately with the thought, "But then nothing would ever get done!"  And I realized that I was fine trusting God to take care of rest and relaxation, but I did not trust God when it came to getting work done.  Sure, God could help me relax and pet a cat, but I didn't feel God was going to be there when it came to getting the dishes done or cleaning the bathroom, which was quite a lesson and one I need more than ever at this time of year.  I hope I can take at least some of that into the coming weeks with me.

Did you do anything this week? Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below. And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

I had planned to post this on Tuesday, but it turned out to be a completely crazy day, and of course, yesterday was my day of rest.

This week I focused on sleep (and fighting with God). The day started out badly. I accidentally ate sugar for breakfast on a day I'd committed not too. I was in a sleepy haze and just forgot. And it didn't get any better.

I didn't want to focus on sleep. I wanted to do a million other things, just like I always do. I wanted to exercise and meditate and clean the fish tank. But I was so very tired. Because I never get enough sleep; I always do those million other things instead. I stay up late because I'm so thankful to have the kids in bed, to have responsibilities done with, to have time for me. I don't want to miss out on all the fun I can finally have at the end of the day by sleeping! And it was the same this week. Like a willful little child (and I should know, I've got two of them) I screamed, "I do not want to go to bed!" at anyone who would listen: my husband, my body, God. I even cried about it. I was so disappointed in myself for wanting to "just" sleep.

But (after a lot of fussing about it) I did. I put everything else aside and got in bed and set the alarm clock for just before the kids got home from school. And I slept for almost five hours. Then I got up (crankily, annoyed at all that time I'd "wasted") ate a quick late lunch and met the kids. I continued to pout and be annoying all day until I made myself go to bed at 10 pm (which is extremely early for me).

And the next day, I felt better. And rewarded myself by staying up past midnight watching TV with my husband, thus starting the whole cycle all over again. Doh! Well, at least for one day, I got the rest I needed, and realized how much I do need it.

Did you do anything this week? Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below. And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

Wow, December first already.  A side benefit of this "Just for Today Challenge" is that one day a week, I know what the date is.  But no, knowing what the date is was not my own challenge for this week.  This week, I was going to focus on moisturizing.  You might think, "Moisturizing?  Of all the things you could concentrate on for one day?  Really?  Using lotion?"  Yes, I really don't moisturize enough.  In fact, I have a condition called "contact dermatitis" or in layperson's terms "housewives' eczema."  It is caused by overexposure to...  (Drum roll, please.)  Soap and water.  (See, anything in excess can be harmful.)  My hands are dry and scaly and cracking (yes, they actually bleed) because I wash them (or dishes or counters or clothes) too often and moisturize not enough.

But I didn't actually end up moisturizing at all (surprised?) because I was too busy concentrating on something much more difficult: not watching TV.  Of all the things I do (or don't do) on my spiritual Wednesdays, I never thought that giving up TV would be one of the challenges.  I'm not anti-TV — I enjoy it — but I've gone years without owning a television and months on end without watching one, and have never really missed it.  Yet, last week, I really craved television.  I wanted to sit down and watch a crappy crime drama, something entertaining and relatively mindless, while the kids were at school.  It's a rare treat I give myself whenever I have an especially big pile of laundry to fold, and I was longing for that luxury.

Of course, I had to consider why it was I so desperately wanted to watch TV on that particular day last week, and I realized that I was tired.  I saw that I use the TV and the computer as a way of keeping myself from falling asleep while not overtaxing my brain with any of that difficult thinking stuff.  I wanted to watch TV because I didn't want to go to sleep, but I also couldn't handle do anything harder than digesting an episode of Cold Case.  So, instead of watching TV and folding laundry, I took a nap, which was just what my body needed.  But all that concentrating on not watching TV drove hand lotion right out of my tired brain.  Oh, well, maybe next week.

Did you do anything this week?  Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below.  And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

Last week, I asked you all to join the Just for Today Challenge with me, where we would all change one thing about our lives for just one day. I'll share what I did, and if you did something yourself, either share about it in the comments or (if you wrote a post about it) enter the URL for the post in Mister Linky below to add a link to your blog.  (This is my first attempt to incorporate Mister Linky, so I'm hoping everything will go smoothly.  Just in case, I'd encourage you to leave a comment too, at least this time.  I'm going to try to make this an ongoing thing, so hopefully I'll work out the kinks as I go.)

As many of you know, I've instituted a day of rest and spirituality for myself every Wednesday, and each Wednesday I'm thinking of focusing on one change I'd like to make.  This week the big challenge was cutting out sugar.  Now some of you might think, "It's not hard to go just one day without sugary treats!"  Well, good for you, apparently you're not addicted to them.  For me, it was hard: really, really, crushingly hard to go the entire day without sugar (and because I only take my caffeine in soda form, caffeine as well).

Actually, that's not entirely true.  I got up in the morning and said, "No, no. No chocolate PopTart for you today!  We're having a bagel instead."  And that wasn't so bad.  Then I ate lunch and I wanted a Coke with it, but I settled for water.  And I wanted some Halloween candy for dessert and my hand was reaching for the bowl, but I pulled it back and said, "I can go just one day without a mini Snickers!"

But then the kids came home from school, and I felt like I was drowning in "Mama, I want..." and "Mama, I need..." and "Mama, where is..." and "Mama, can I [insert insane and dangerous request here]..." and "Mama, Daddy said I could..." and "But he started it" and "No, she started it" and "No, he did!"  I wanted one of those freaking Halloween candies so bad I was ready to tear my hair out.  And I wanted to wash it down with a can of Coke.  So I stopped taking things one day at a time and took them one minute at a time for the few hours until Mark got home from work.  Once Mark was home, I had dinner, went off to my meditation group and came home to the kids asleep.  And I thought about that pumpkin pie in the fridge, but I didn't need it.

So, I learned that I really use sugar and caffeine to handle the stress of juggling the kids' needs and demands, of setting limits and enforcing rules, of just the plain sensory overload of two kids focusing their attention on me.  And I learned that one day without sugar was hard, but it also acted like a reset button: the next day, I didn't crave sugar as much and while I let myself indulge again, I ate (and drank) less of it than at any time in the last few months.  I've also noticed that my sugar intake has gradually increased over the course of the week, creeping not quite back up, but closer, to where it had been before.

Still, it's comforting to know that my one day a week of change could be a way of hitting reset on a lot of things in my life, and I'm looking forward to testing the theory with some other behaviors.  And I want to know how your one day worked for you!  What did you add to your life or give up?  What did it feel like and what did you learn?  Post a link and/or leave a comment.  And feel free to pick a day and a behavior yourself and join in next Tuesday too.  If you participated this week, you can keep it up with the same thing this week or choose something new.  It's up to you.

Mr. Linky:

If there is one thing I know about making changes in my life, it's that I can't do it alone.  Those of you who have been clicking over to the Second Road know that I've instituted a day of spirituality and rest (a sort of personal Sabbath) one day a week, and for those of you who don't (and I don't blame you, it drives me crazy to click the links out to other sites), well, now you know.  But it occurred to me that while not being part of any organized religion is freeing (Sabbath on Wednesdays, baby!), it can also be isolating.  But then I saw a solution!  What if some of us are independent together?

We can each spend one day changing one thing about our lives.  It doesn't have to be as big as adding a whole set of Sabbath rules.  I'm sure there's something that each and every one of you wants to change.  Maybe you want to eat more vegetables or exercise more or cut down on TV.  Maybe you want to pray more or flip people off on the freeway less.  Why not do it for just one day a week?  Just see how it feels and where it leads.  And then share it.

So, if you want to join me, pick a day and pick a change.  Floss your teeth one day a week.  Go vegan one day a week.  Take a long, hot bath one day a week.  Just one.  It's not a lifetime commitment.  It's just one little day between now and next Tuesday.  You can even define "day" for yourself (daylight hours, 24 hours, whatever you want).  If you have a blog, blog about it.  Then next Tuesday, I'll let you know what I did, and provide a place for you to link back to your post (or comment and share if you don't have a blog), so that we can all share.  So who's up for it?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

Of course, I'd love a link back here, so that other people can join.  You can use the image above if you want to, but it must include credit to the photographer.  Here is the code if you need it:

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<table border="0" width="150" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://aroomofmamasown.com/2009/11/introducing-the-just-for-today-challenge/" mce_href="http://aroomofmamasown.com/2009/11/introducing-the-just-for-today-challenge/"><img src="http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/ae23/mamampj/JustForToday.jpg" mce_src="http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/ae23/mamampj/JustForToday.jpg" border="0" alt="Just For Today Challenge, Hosted by http://aroomofmamasown.com, Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/catdancing/ licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/" width="150" height="150"></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;" mce_style="font-size:78%;">Image by: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/catdancing/" mce_href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/catdancing/">catdancing</a> on Flickr<br><br /> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/" mce_href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0</a><br /> </span></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>