Book Report: ADHD for Smart Ass Women

Listen-up my ADHD ladies, I'm about to potentially save you 7.5 hours of your life with a simple flow chart based on the premise of this famous Atlantic article.

This book starts out like a first online date. You know you're interested from the pictures/cover. The date starts out well - you have things in common. Then you start realizing you see the world through different eyes. It's not going to work out. 

This is the book my mom would have written about her experience with ADHD (if she could sit still long enough to write). You can do it all - the family, the career, the creative side hustles. Your ADHD is your super power. Sure, neurotypical folks can effortlessly get their kids to preschool on time but you can hyper focus. Yes, our relationships are more dysfunctional but we're more "fun". True, meetings are ten times more boring for you than your colleagues but use your extra creativity to make a world where meetings don't exist.

Here was my big take-home from this book: "ADHD women typically do better outside the home because there they have structure and intellectual stimulation". Ruh Roh. 

But what if working outside the home, for a myriad of reasons, isn't an option? Well, we do what us ADHD smart ass women have always done. We try harder than our neurotypical peers while looking and feeling like this most days:

OMG Paige - what's happened to you? This doesn't sound like your optimistic - also a trait of ADHD - self? Not to worry, I haven't hit any new kind of bottom. It's just more of the same realization that my self worth or adequacy has nothing to do with what I can do and everything to do with being loved by God. I don't know why I, and at least one of my kids, inherited ADHD. I'm not going to put any "for such a time as this" spin on the current state of affairs.

During Robin's bedtime devotional, I was reminded of this quote by Mother Teresa, "We can do not great things, only small things with great love. What is important is not how much you do, but how much love you put into doing it." Which, incidentally, is a blend of my two top character strengths that I discovered through the book's suggested online questionnaire. My top strength was love followed by spirituality. These are strengths I get to use everyday in chaos management. And when it gets too much, a little well timed self care is in order.

Cucumber eye mask + sleep = super hero level recovery

Book Report: The Hating Game

The Hating Game is the last romance novel I'll read for the forseable future. I want to spend more time catching-up with friends and/or reading biographies. Ideally I'll also be spending more time with Paul once he wraps this big project on Thursday. Generally, I need less escape in my life and more commitment to making my life more manageable. 

That being said, The Hating Game was a fun end of a reading era. Only in romance novels do the men live at the gym and spend more time on their appearance than women. Oh, true fantasy. 

This is what real life looks like these days:

Hugo is a school kid! Complete with Schultüte. 

Most days Hugo and Cros take the tram together, but when we went to Hugo's first day celebration we rolled deep...

And faded fast...

Our littlest dude turns seven tomorrow. 

It's been a wild ride.

Book Report: Funny Story

After our first positive Corona test, I knew I was going to need something to get through the days ahead. Thankfully, the PDX library delivered this gem just in time.

I liked Emily Henry's Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation but I enjoyed Funny Story more. I found the characters much more relatable and generally less annoying. These are romance novels staring millennials after all, so one has to accept some of the quirks associated with the special snowflake generation. 

The book got me through the rolling positive corona tests happening every two days. We were 5 for 5. I tested positive on my birthday. Also on my birthday, a louse jumped out of Paul's hair. So, this book got me through hours of changing and washing sheets while Paul spent hours combing our hair.  It was a memroble birthday to say the least.

But I'm grateful that we got over covid soon enough for Crosby to do his favorite art camp, Hugo to start school, and Carmen to follow around her new favorite person. 

Thankfully Robin came recently recovered and fully boosted. She's going to need all the immunity she can get.