Giving up

As of Wednesday I have given up sweets for Lent and I have been craving them every hour day since. I think I'm having ice cream withdrawals. Seriously. From every night to none? Surely I should have begun the process of weening a week ago. I'm not so secretly  counting the days until I can have a piece of birthday cake (29!) to celebrate Anderson turning 4 (because I make my own rules and I say everyone in the family eats cake!). Now that I write that, it seems like a really far way off. Hmm.

And if that weren't sacrifice enough, I have also put myself back on the same TV diet from last year and added a new sacrifice into the mix which I'm referring to as the "social media diet". Using the phone or computer in front of the boys to quickly check updates on Instagram or Facbook has become a bad habit that needs to stop. So the phone gets put away when they are awake, only to be used for making or responding to calls or answering text messages (not in their presence). So far it's been totally painless, despite the numerous missed calls and texts from Gabe. I guess if my phone is not going to be near me I should probably at least turn on the ringer.

Part of the purpose for making such sacrifices is to challenge yourself to break bad habits and improve your quality of life in the process. Last year's TV diet resulted in a new found love for reading and I've read every single night since, finishing more books in the last year than in probably all of my twenties. And while I know that I will never give up sweets (that's just ridiculous, really), I do hope that I learn to not be so mindless in my use of technology in front of the kids. It's too easy, really, to become enslaved to such unimportant nonsense. A student told me the other day that it takes 30 days to break a habit, I am hoping he is right.