Ontario, Canada: Step back in time with Bruce County farm diaries

From shorelinebeacon.com

What better way to learn about a pioneer settler’s daily life than by reading their diary? 

The Archives at the Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre has collected 107 rural diaries written by 13 residents of Bruce County. 

 You can travel back to the 19th century and follow the life of, for example, Nathaniel Edward Leeder Sr. (1835-1923). He and his son Ed kept diaries from 1854 to 1900. Dipping into their diaries reveals the daily social and work life of the Leeder family.  

 Nathaniel was only 16 when he emigrated from Norfolk, England in 1851. After stops in Quebec City, Hamilton and Doone, Ontario, Nathaniel took up land in Saugeen Township in 1853.

 Finally, a year later, his parents, Robert and Hannah, and his three brothers, Robert Jr., Philip and Fred, arrived and joined him in the task of clearing the land. The Leeders were among the first to settle in the area—Robert Leeder was the first miller at Mill Creek near Port Elgin. 

The diaries of Olive Burgess detail early pioneer life in Bruce County. (BCM&CC, A2014.008.0048)  Photo by Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre

Nathaniel’s diaries are the oldest ones in the Archives. He starts on Nov. 5, 1854: “This day I commence keeping a Memoranda of weather, work and business transactions. Cold with layer of snow.” 

 He writes about buying herring packed in pork and whiskey barrels, cutting logs for an ox shed, grinding corn, underbrushing, boiling pumpkins, tapping trees and boiling sap, drawing fence stakes, making shingles, raising a barn and buying goods from Ruby’s store
 

In 1855 he mentions planting at least 15 different seeds in his garden or fields, like: beets, carrots, chicory, peach stones, peas, potatoes, onions, radishes, rhubarb, spinach, barley, corn, millet, timothy and wheat. 

 On top of working his farm, Nathaniel attended meetings about establishing a school in the area and later served on the school board. He also got involved in municipal administration, serving as Tavern Inspector, Inspector of Noxious Weeds, and Township Treasurer (1892-1914). 

Nathaniel went to meetings of the West Bruce Farming Institute. In an Oct. 10, 1859 diary entry, we learn of an agricultural show: “Township show entered. … Took second prize for fall wheat, first prize for onions, fourth prize for butter and first prize for carrots. Sold Henry Hilker two hundred bushels of fall wheat to be as good as that shown at the show and delivered in two weeks from this date”. 

 Nathaniel married Mary Caroline Schwendker (originally from Germany) in 1860 and had five children. They moved to Missouri in 1870 where Nathaniel acted as a postmaster and a schoolteacher. The family returned to Saugeen Township in 1874. 

 The diaries of another farming family, Elizabeth Oliver “Olive” Burgess (1896–1980) and her brother James “Rowand” Burgess (1898–1968), of Arran Township, begin ten years after the Leeders’ end. The siblings’ diaries (from 1911 to 1974) record Olive working tirelessly on her uncle Alfred’s farm and Rowand working in the fields and cutting timber in the forest. Technology gradually comes to the farm: a cream separator in 1916, a gravity washing machine in 1917 and a Bell telephone at their uncle’s in 1918.  

 Olive and Rowand Burgess began writing as teenagers, and their diary entries between 1911 and 1918 mention social events like patriotic picnics, school box socials, literary society debates and a Leap Year party. 

 Many of the Leeder diaries are in fragile condition, so the Archives saw the need to digitize the collection to make it more accessible to the public. To date six volunteers have transcribed over 2,800 pages of rural and military diaries, which are available for online viewing at BCM&CC’s “Online Collections”, by entering the word Diary in the Keyword Search box. 

 Making rural diaries more accessible is also the aim of the University of Guelph’s Rural Diary Archive. Launched by Dr. Catharine A. Wilson in 2015, the online database assembles over 200 diarists from rural Ontario, writing from 1800 to 1960.
With the help of volunteer transcribers, thousands of handwritten pages are being turned into searchable typescript. The RDA project encourages people to volunteer—the web site has full instructions on how to transcribe a diary. 

 Visit brucemuseum.ca’s Research Information page for links to historic diaries and letters, including images of the original diary pages and links for downloading PDF typed transcriptions.
You can join the Archives (archives@brucecounty.ca) as a volunteer transcriber, or donate diaries written in Bruce County. 

Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre Archivist Deb Sturdevant holds a diary of siblings Elizabeth Oliver “Olive” Burgess (1896–1980) and her brother James “Rowand” Burgess (1898–1968), of Arran Township. – (BCM&CC)

https://www.shorelinebeacon.com/news/local-news/step-back-in-time-with-bruce-county-farm-diaries 

Why you should journal about your work life

From ft.com

By Isabel Berwick

Logging daily highlights can help track the patterns of your activities — and frustrations

I’ve kept a diary at various points in my life, but never thought about doing it in a work context. That’s going to change, after talking to journaling enthusiast Ollie Henderson. Ollie is author of an excellent guide to career transition (another good September topic), Work/Life Flywheel. He posted about his journal on LinkedIn and I was intrigued — so I asked him to share more details with Working It readers. 

He got started, it turns out, for the same reason that those of us who love personal diaries keep at it: maintaining a record of our daily lives, before it is lost to unreliable human memory. Ollie told me that when he started a career pivot, in January 2020, he realised that “thousands of moments that had shaped a decade of my work and life were a blur”. Relatable. 

 He went on: “As I considered my next steps, I struggled to identify the skills and expertise I could offer to other businesses. That’s when I started my work journal. I started by listing things I was proud of, exploring how I wanted my work and life to evolve, and focusing on what I’d enjoyed in my career. Once I had some clarity, I shifted to ensuring I didn’t forget anything else, noting key moments down each day: achievements, challenges I was struggling with, breakthroughs, and interactions with colleagues, collaborators and clients.” 

                                                                 Write it down, feel like a winner © FT montage/Unsplash

 The practicalities of keeping a work journal will depend on your individual preference, but Ollie started with pen and paper. This fits into your life with very little extra effort (or “friction”, to use the techie term), which is key when you start any new work habit 🔑. 

 Writing down short entries in a notebook, whether that’s “as it happens” or during a few minutes of reflection at the end of the day, allows you to record small things that otherwise get lost. When you feel you’ve “done nothing” during a working week, the records (let’s hope) will tell you otherwise. Logging progress and achievement can be especially important for people who are self-employed with no manager to “mark the homework”. 

I asked Ollie to send me a photo (names redacted). 

                                                                                          Ollie’s work diary 

One of the great things about diaries (of all sorts) is that they can show us long-term patterns of behaviour, preferences and problems that we can miss in the tumult of our day-to-day lives. As Ollie told me: “I find it fascinating to see which moments I note down, positive or negative, because the same themes keep popping up. What does it say when you consistently highlight how good it felt to present your ideas to your team? You probably want to do more of that. What does it tell you when your manager consistently drains your energy? Maybe it’s time to look for another job.” 

Ollie has since taken his journaling digital, because he wants to be able to search and find useful data insights. He could not find an app that did everything he wanted so he’s building his own, with the help of collaborators. (Follow him on LinkedIn to keep up with his progress.) 

 None of us are going to be able to turn back time (sorry, Cher). Not to get too deep, but work journaling might help us to make sense of the transience of our lives. Final word from Ollie: “One profound impact is my perception of time. It can often feel like time is slipping away. Stopping to reflect on what you’re doing each day gives the sense of time slowing down. Marking important moments helps you differentiate one day from the next. It stops the sensation of life blurring into one.”

https://www.ft.com/content/c8ef6d82-1118-47d5-a472-d133eafff284 

Inside Stanford’s fight to keep a precious diary about China’s troubled past

From mercurynews.com

In legal tug-of-war, university is resisting pressure to return diary to China

Protected under lock and key at Stanford University, the personal diary of a prominent Chinese political official offers a rare inside look at eight tumultuous decades of Communist Party rule, recounting an unvarnished version of history at a time when the nation’s government is seeking to sanitize its past.

But the late Li Rui’s 94-year-old widow says the diary belongs to her, not Stanford. She’s filed a suit against Stanford, demanding its return to her in China.

“The case has enormous significance,” said Orville Schell, director of the Centre on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “In chapter and verse, Li Rui documented the myriad ways in which the Chinese Communist Party was very savage, inequitable and unjust.”

In this Oct. 2004, photo and released by Li Nanyang, Communist Party veteran Li Rui reads in his study in Beijing. Li worked for Mao Zedong but later became a fierce critic of the regime. (Li Nanyang via AP)

The fight over its fate played out in an Oakland federal courtroom this week, pitting Stanford’s prestigious Hoover Institution Library & Archives against Li’s second wife and widow, Zhang Yuzhen, who the university alleges is a front for China’s powerful Communist Party.

It’s more than just an inheritance dispute. Historians fear that if the diary is returned to China, the government may alter it to rewrite the past. The trial before U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar ends on Thursday, and a decision will come later.

The real opponent, Stanford attorneys say, is not Li’s elderly widow, who likely has little income, but the Chinese government bankrolling the case.

“For political control, it’s very important to have a perfect version of history presented to the Chinese public,” said Perry Link, a leading American China scholar at UC Riverside and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton. “What this diary does is undermine that perfect picture.”

The handwritten diary and 40 boxes of other materials — letters, meeting minutes, work notes, poetry and photographs — document the life of Li, a top official and personal secretary to long-time party leader Mao Zedong. He died in China in 2019 at the age of 101.

They were donated by his daughter, Nanyang Li, a physicist and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party who lives in the East Bay. According to court filings, Jiashu Cheng of the Stanford Centre at Peking University realized the historical importance of the diaries in 2013 and approached the family about a possible donation. Li feared that the materials would be destroyed by the Party.

The diaries of former Chinese official Li Rui, a prominent critic of the Chinese Communist Party, are at the centre of a U.S. legal battle. Stanford University assets that the diaries should remain at its Hoover Institution, where his daughter donated them, and not be returned to his elderly widow, who has been accused of acting as a front for Chinese authorities.(Hoover Institution) 

With her stepmother’s assistance, Nanyang Li gathered diaries and notebooks, according to court filings. She says she carried the materials out of China to honour her father’s wish that they rest at Stanford’s famed archives, where they would be accessible to international scholars.

On the witness stand last week, she tearfully described how she promised her father that she would carry on his legacy. Because the materials were carried to California before her father’s death, they were not part of his estate, she says.

The widow’s lawyers argue that Li never transferred legal ownership of the materials to his daughter from his first marriage.

In legal limbo, the materials are stored in the Archive’s acid-free boxes on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a climate-controlled room to preserve their fragile paper.

The Hoover Archives has long been a place where scholars could come pore over its holdings, devoted to war, peace and revolution in the 20th and 21st centuries. They preserve more than 7,000 collections in about 150 languages about the Cold War, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, World Wars I and II, and various political and ideological movements.

In millions of handwritten Chinese characters, the diary includes much material about Li’s routine daily life from 1946 to 2018, such as the weather or an afternoon swim, according to books about the diaries.

But its richest vein is a repository of his political insights, tracing the arc of China’s messy and nuanced climb from a poor and isolated nation to a repressive global superpower.

Born in 1917, Li was an idealistic young man who joined the throngs of young people devoted to the Chinese Communist Party. A brilliant writer and thinker, he quickly climbed the Party’s ranks. He was hand-picked by Mao to become his personal secretary in 1958.

He was unafraid to criticize the Party as it evolved from a heroic movement in the 1930s and 1940s to a corrupt bureaucracy in the 1960s and 1970s, said Perry.

“All through his life, he was consistent in supporting freedom and human rights,” Perry said.

Li was expelled from the Party and imprisoned in work camps from 1959 to 1978, including eight years in solitary confinement, after criticizing Mao’s disastrous effort to modernize the agricultural sector using communist ideologies, causing a catastrophic famine. Following Mao’s death, the more pragmatic Deng Xiaoping came to power, and Li was reinstated into the Party.

Although his writing was censored, Li continued to document the Party’s abuses and stubbornly press for democracy.  From his balcony, he witnessed the brutal 1989 massacre of unarmed pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square scene. His diary describes the event, calling it “Black Weekend” in English.

His daughter made the diary’s donation to Hoover just days before Li’s death, when he was in a coma and safe from possible reprisal.

The case already has been heard once, and Stanford lost. The Chinese court gave the university 30 days to return the materials.

But Stanford says that the proceeding was unfair. The Beijing court blocked the university from presenting evidence in that case, said attorney Mark Litvack of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP.

It has sued Zhang in California in return.

Over the past decade, China has sought increasing control over historical narratives to escape responsibility for its past, according to Schell.

China not only silences its own citizens, he said, “but is reaching out around the world to intimidate others from saying, writing, researching and participating in ways that do not reflect kindly on their rule.”

Nanyang Li, daughter of former Chinese Communist Party official and critic Li Rui, says that her father wished that his diaries be kept at Stanford’s Hoover Institution as a resource for people seeking to understand the history of modern China. (Hoover Institution) 

Lawyers for Li’s widow argue Stanford can keep photocopy reprints and scanned files of the diaries, according to a brief filed by attorneys of the law firm Skaggs and Faucette.

But Stanford worries that if it returns donated items under pressure, no one will ever donate again.

The original physical archives are immensely valuable, scholars say. Because digital copies can be altered, the Chinese government could assert, “‘The materials don’t say what you claim they do. We have the originals,'” Perry said.

“An archive that sits in ‘hard copy’ form irrefutably documents what happened in history,” said Schell. “It’s immensely important to keep the record correct.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/09/04/inside-stanfords-fight-to-keep-a-precious-diary-about-chinas-troubled-past/

Researcher reads hundreds of diary entries to quantify the restorative power of Scotland's lochs and rivers

From phys.org

By Megan Grace, The Conversation

In October 2021, a man recreated a walk he first completed 62 years ago by climbing just under 3,000 feet to reach the summit of Beinn Damh on the north-west coast of Scotland. The steep ridge walk provided unobstructed views across Loch Damh and Loch Torridon. The combination of dramatic vistas and poignant nostalgia left him feeling energised and restored.

Later that same year, a woman documented regular walks along the banks of the fast-flowing river Thurso, near Inverness, in search of otters. Over the winter months, sightings of wildlife on the riverbanks alongside cheerful exchanges with other walkers strengthened her connection with her local community.

In the spring of 2022, another man recorded the joy of swimming in a loch at the bottom of his garden in central Scotland: "Water was warm and enticing—took me five minutes to get waist deep—then… off I went for my longest swim of the year (5 mins and I was out). Refreshed and alive!!"

All three of these people took part in my environmental research project investigating whether Scottish freshwater environments can provide positive mental health outcomes over time. In total, 45 participants from across Scotland took part, with over 700 diary entries recorded between July 2021 and October 2022. Four groups of Scottish adults completed a three-month-long diary at different intervals during this timeframe.

Completed diaries captured first-hand accounts of the benefits of freshwater interactions and created a large database of freshwater experiences: from sailing and swimming to sketching by the water's edge.

This study was one of the first to use diaries to study our relationship with blue spaces. By analysing these personal stories, experiences and emotions, my diary study adds to the growing body of research quantifying the health benefits of spending time in nature.

                                                                               Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

There were some challenges. Transcribing diary entries was time-consuming and deciphering handwriting was tricky at times. One note about watching young people partying next to a riverside path intrigued me: "the ducks weren't overly alarmed, just retreated as the ravers headed towards them backwards." Months later, during a discussion with a fellow Ph.D. student, I realized they had been rowing, not raving.

Overall, my results highlight the potential for lakes and rivers to improve people's physical and mental well-being. Diary entries revealed that participants held a strong appreciation of Scotland's freshwater environments and consistently felt they gained restorative health benefits such as calmness and improved concentration levels.

Feeling fresh air and the meditative flow of the water led to a sense of escapism from everyday concerns for many participants. Interestingly, despite the timing of the project coinciding with ever-changing public health policies, COVID was only mentioned in two diary entries. Other research has found that the pandemic led to an increased appreciation of inland waterways.

Many participants had an emotional connection to the freshwater environments that they regularly visited. This helped to create a sense of belonging. However, this emotional attachment also meant that diarists could be adversely affected by environmental change.

Litter, agricultural pollution and timber harvesting regularly contributed to negative freshwater experiences. Investment in the maintenance and upkeep of freshwater environments therefore has the potential to have far-reaching benefits, both in terms of public health outcomes as well as biodiversity levels.

The process of journaling also proved to enhance the restorative effect of visiting Scotland's inland waters, as one person wrote: "this diary has been really helpful charting my progress and patterns, that I may even carry it on myself!"

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-hundreds-diary-entries-quantify-power.html

 

A Playlist to Remember

From nytimes.com

By Melissa Kirsch

Songs can help demarcate this chapter of your life: It’s a way to mark time, to keep one period of time from bleeding indistinctly into the next 

I am putting the finishing touches on my Summer 2024 playlist. This isn’t a collection of the summer’s hottest hits, although Chappell Roan and Charli XCX did make it on there. It’s a mix of the songs that I’ve been listening to this summer, regardless of when they came out — more Barack Obama than Billboard.

I’ve been curating this playlist all summer, adding to it whenever I notice there’s a song or an album that I’ve been listening to again and again such that it’s becoming part of my life soundtrack. My Summer 2024 playlist is not meant to be listened to during the Summer of 2024. It’s for the Winter of 2024, or some far-off day in 2035, when I want to evoke this period of time. This period of time when I rediscovered Genesis and became convinced that their 1983 song “That’s All” might be the best song ever written. When I spent an entire month listening to only “Worth It” by Raye and “You’ll Accomp’ny Me” by Bob Seger until I knew every lyric and drumbeat and guitar riff by heart.

When I hear these songs in the future, they’ll trigger memories from this summer. I’ll be back by the lake where a duck walked right out of the water and stood by my beach chair. I’ll be sitting on the screened-in porch drinking iced coffee while the rain blows in. By making a playlist of the season, I’m delineating a chapter of my life. I’m engineering a mechanism to induce nostalgia in the future.

                                                                                                             María Jesús Contreras

This dividing of life into chapters is something I’ve become more deliberate about doing as I’ve gotten older. I don’t want one season to just bleed into the next, the days losing their distinctness, vivid experiences fading as they recede into memory. Anything that can create order out of the accumulation of life lived seems useful. Sometimes I’ll just go around and take photos of my apartment so that I’ll have a record of how it looked in this moment in time: the plants and the bedsheets and the clothes piled on the chair. They’re not photos I want to look at now, but 20 years from now when I’ve forgotten about these details that are mundane but so essential to my daily life.

My friend Grace has been making monthly playlists for the 10 years I’ve known her. She calls them her musical diary. “I don’t keep a written journal, but I can look back at the playlists and remember how I was feeling at that time, what was going on in my life: a breakup, a move, a low, a high,” she told me recently. This is what I want: reliable ways to conjure the feelings, the major and minor events.

I feel a lot of remorse around not keeping a journal, a record of my days. I kept one as a kid, but in college, I made the error of reading those cloth-covered notebooks. It was too soon — I was so embarrassed at my young self’s hopes and concerns and insights (or lack thereof) that I took the diaries and threw them in the dumpster behind my dorm. How stupid! How rash! Ever since, any effort to keep a journal has felt doomed, a stop-and-start affair that’s always tinged with anger at my college self’s impulsivity.

I like the idea of using playlists as a journal. It’s easy to do, and easy to stick with. But while I hope the songs on my playlist will evoke forgotten memories and feelings when I listen to them in the future, they’re unlikely to unleash the complicated thought processes, the quickly vanishing flashes of insight, the tiny observations that you uncover only when you actually sit down and write through them. Perhaps this weekend I’ll listen to my summer playlist and try writing out a companion journal entry, a sort of State of the Season that goes deeper into this moment than songs written by someone else ever could.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/briefing/a-playlist-to-remember.html

“Bye bye”: The Last Haunting Entry Heath Ledger Made into His ‘The Dark Knight’ Diary Before His Death Reveals the Animal That May Have Inspired His Terrifying Joker Laugh

From fandomwire.com 

SUMMARY

• Heath Ledger's 'The Dark Knight' diary resurfaces, revealing his last entry and the animal that inspired his iconic Joker laugh
• Heath Ledger prepared extensively for his role of Joker in The Dark Knight, keeping a detailed diary containing pictures, text, and more.
• Among the pages of Ledger's diary is a picture of a hyena, which many believe inspired the Joker's iconic, terrifying laugh.
• Fans have reacted emotionally to the resurfaced diary pages, noting changes in Ledger's handwriting and expressing sadness over the diary's public exposure.
• 
  
  
• In the vast landscape of Hollywood, few have left an impact on the ever-changing nature of the film industry like Heath Ledger. The brilliant actor left the world in 2008, just months before the world could witness the best performance of his life: Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Still hailed as one of the best Joker portrayals of all time, the actor continues to be remembered for his talents, wits, and performances even after all this time.
• Recently, a few pages of his ‘The Dark Knight‘ diary resurfaced on the internet, revealing what his last entry was and how he came up with his iconic Joker laugh.

  Heath Ledger’s Last Diary Entry and the Animal that Inspired Joker

  

  Heath Ledger as Joker in The Dark Knight | Warner Bros.

  Heath Ledger died due to an accidental overdose at the age of 28 (see THR) when he was at the prime of his career. While many initially hailed the actor’s death as suicide due to his role as the diabolical, complex, and devilish Joker in The Dark Knight, which certainly made a significant impact on his mental health (see People), it was later ruled ‘accidental’.

• Having passed away just months before the world could witness his impeccable near-perfect, if not perfect performance, Ledger continues to be missed even after decades since the movie was released. In an interview with Empire, months before his death, the actor had revealed the extreme steps he had taken to prepare for the role.

  I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts.

  The said diary has resurfaced on the internet, which was first revealed in Too Young To Die, a documentary made on the actor’s life. Featured in one of the pages of the diary is a picture of a hyena, which fans and others widely believe, inspired his iconic Joker laugh.

  The images and text featured in the diary are definitely not for the faint of heart, for some of them feature harrowing details such as his last diary entry, with only the words— Bye Bye— scribbled on the whole page.

• Fans React to Heath Ledger’s The Dark Knight Diary

  

  A page from Heath Ledger’s diary via Heath Ledger: Too Young To Die | Broadview TV

  In the documentary, Heath Ledger: Too Young To Die, Heath Ledger’s father Kim revealed the diary that the actor used to keep while filming and prepping for his role as Joker. From ideas to scribbled notes to references and more, the diary also contains pictures and more. Instead of Ledger, the diary looks more like it was written by Batman’s greatest nemesis, whom the Australian actor rightly described as an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown in his interview with Empire.

• After some of the pictures of the diary’s images went viral on Instagram, this is how fans reacted:

  His handwriting changes, you can tell it’s obsession. -@naitikk_sxinda

  Damn not the bye bye in the last page. -karlscfni

  So sad. This should have never been made public. Method acting can be dangerous. Is it really acting at that point? -@formertattedteach

  Bro was so much into acting that he stopped acting. -@onebignose

  Even his hand writing changed from the first to the last entry. That role physiologically changed him. -@jess26127

  As fans continue to lament the actor’s death, there is no denying that his portrayal of Joker extended beyond accolades. Even now, his iconic portrayal continues to influence roles and movies across the film industry, leaving an indelible mark on both superhero movies and the broader cinematic landscape.

• https://fandomwire.com/bye-bye-the-last-haunting-entry-heath-ledger-made-into-his-the-dark-knight-diary-before-his-death-reveals-the-animal-that-may-have-inspired-his-terrifying-joker-laugh/

Nanny Diaries: dealing with the stress of being a parent

From wigantoday.net 

By Emma Appleton

Breathe!

I sat down to write this about 4 times.

The washing machine finished. The dog was barking at something, my daughter wanted me, then I had to go to work! On the way home I checked my diary and added this job to the others id not managed to do yet.

It made me think, as a working parent these days we are so often running up hill carrying the weight of our ‘to-do’ lists as well as trying to raise happy, successful, grounded children. It’s not easy!

Then you’ve got someone like me telling you how to be the perfect parent, social media constantly showing you you’re doing it wrong and the government and other people interfering too. It’s HARD.

So I want to tell you I GET IT. I’m a parent too. A working full time one. It’s a constant battle to keep your head above water, to get the never ending jobs done.

So I want you to read today how to take care of YOU. Because ultimately that in turn, makes your children happy and that’s my life’s work.

Make time. Write in your diary “REST” and stick to it. When someone asks you to book something in that day say you can’t. It’s booked. You don’t need to say what with.

Spend time with your friends. REAL time. Alone. How often do we share snatched conversations with other parents because that’s the only time you have?

Go to bed early and turn your phone off. Turn it face down. Get a book, a magazine, watch a movie or anything but don't look at social media. It’s soul destroying sometimes.

Walk outside. Spend a little time every day outdoors, look up. Remember how small you are in the universe. Listen to the world.

Don’t drink too much or take drugs, that’s false happiness.

Be content with who you are. If you’re not work on what being ‘you’ looks like.

Keep a diary.

This seems obvious but I’ve only recently started using a real, paper diary and it’s made a huge difference to my organisation and meant less stress constantly trying to remember things!

Be grateful for all that you have. It’s more than some people.

Be present. Live in the 'now'.

Then look at your children, aren't they just WONDERFUL?

Now BREATHE!

https://www.wigantoday.net/news/opinion/nanny-diaries-dealing-with-the-stress-of-being-a-parent-4724719#