Spring Break and Renewal

It has been a busy month in the Rubin household!  Dropping in this week, not with a new podcast episode, but an update on what I’ve been up to lately and to let the Modern Mom tribe that I’ll be taking a bit of a spring break from releasing new episodes.

New beginnings

My new car!

After nearly 13 great years together, my trusty 2005 Honda Accord “Suzy” was starting to feel not as reliable as she once had, and so my husband and I started to research some new cars.  I knew I wanted something with a little more room and went looking at small SUVs.  We visited the Chicago Auto Show in February and narrowed down the list of potential models to the Honda CRV and the Subaru Forester or Crosstrek, did some test drives towards the end of the month and settled on the the CRV.

 

After a bit of a crazy car buying experience, which included lots of waiting around and signing a bunch of paperwork to buy a car, only to be told that they made an error and accidentally sold me a higher model and couldn’t let me go with it… I finally got my new (yet to be named) CRV at the beginning of March.  The tech features are incredible compared to the Accord, and I’m feeling a little spoiled with all of it!  It has lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, backup camera, plus Apple Car Play so that you can play podcasts/music from your phone via your dash, as well as use phone navigation through the dash, making calls, answering texts, etc. I really like sitting higher up too.  I love it so much!

New kitchen!

The other new beginning in the Rubin household is that our kitchen remodel is finally wrapping up!

Our old kitchen was a bit frustrating for me… don’t get me wrong, it served us very well for the seven years that we used it, but it had its downfalls. The pic here was the “cleaned up” version of our kitchen (picture was taken to sell the cabinets).  It always looked cluttered (generally worse than this) because there wasn’t quite enough cabinet space and we ended up having stuff all over the counter tops. All. the. time.  Visual clutter is very mentally distracting to me, so instead of being a cozy spot for me, it was stressful most of the time I was in the kitchen.  Additionally, the corner sink made it difficult for more than one person to really be working in the kitchen at one time – we would always end up bumping into each other and curse “corner sink!!!” So, a new kitchen has been on our radar for quite a while and I was super excited that we were finally able to start it this year!

My husband has been a general contractor in the past, so he was managing the team that did the work in our kitchen.  It was supposed to be a month long job; I mentally prepared myself that it was going to take two… having lived through all of his contracting jobs, I knew delays were inevitable.  What we weren’t prepared for though was someone calling the city on us on day 2 of demolition for doing work without a permit.  Long story short, it all worked out well, except it delayed us a couple of weeks.  So, we are wrapping up the final touches this week – two months after we tore down the cabinets and started work. (We still have to put a final coat of polyurethane on the flooring, hence the moving blankets on the floor in the picture below)

We were able to move back into the kitchen a few days ago and to say I love the new kitchen is an understatement!  The new layout works so much better, as does the additional cabinet space. The fresh space and lightness of it makes me so happy, and it has gotten me excited to start cooking again. I’m so grateful for the fresh start!

 

 

Burnout

In February, I had done a flurry of recordings for upcoming episodes – I think it ended up being about 5-6 episodes over the course of two weeks.  By the time I hit “stop record” on the last one of that series, I was feeling really burned out on doing interviews.  It was too much. The way I had found guests and scheduled things just didn’t work. Additionally, the production of the episode after finishing recording the interview is pretty labor intensive and that was becoming a chore. And since I’m doing this for fun and don’t make any money from it (yet!), I realized that I need to find the passion and fun again!

Renewal

I ended up hiring Gina Fresquez to be my business coach in March as well. I had gotten to a point with The Modern Mom Society, now 9 months in, where I felt like I was spinning my wheels a bit and had lost clarity on what I wanted out of it and what I was doing. It was still a passion project for me, but I had lost a bit of the fire that I had in the beginning and wanted to get re-inspired in addition to feeling the burnout I just mentioned.

We’ve been doing some interesting work around listening to what my soul wants and taking some time to “do nothing” and slow down some to help me gain clarity. I’m definitely more of a “decide from my head” gal versus “decide from my heart” gal, and doing some of this work has been a little uncomfortable… and necessary. I think there is more work to do around limiting beliefs and breaking myself out of the self-imposed box that I’ve created.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress, but I felt it important to mention what I was doing in this area, because it plays into my decision to take a spring break.

Spring break

We are going on a spring break road trip to Nashville. It will be really nice to get out of town for a bit and have some time with the family. So the trip, coupled with needing to finish putting the kitchen together in order to host Easter for my family, and needing mental break from the podcast leads me here letting you know that I am taking a short break from The Modern Mom Society.

I will be back though! I still have those episodes that I had recorded in February waiting for release… lots of good stuff for you: a mom of 18 kids, a sleep expert who is a British expat living in Chicago, a sensory specialist, an entrepreneur who focuses on helping working moms balance it all, and the mom who hosts the Chicago New Moms Group talking about things you didn’t know before you became a mom and finding your mom tribe.

Stay tuned!

Happy Spring Break!! I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for this long long winter to be over!