So last week my youngest was a bit off his food and I had this feeling that he was coming down with something. This led me to think that maybe I wouldn’t be able to go to work.

For two days he seemed OK but not great. I went to work one day and that night he had there’s no way to say this delicately a ‘wet fart’ and I knew then I most likely wouldn’t be going to work the next morning. With that at the back of my mind I gave the boys a bath and started to get them ready for bed. As a precaution I had been leaving bed mats around the house (as anyone would do who has experienced the full impact of a kids stomach bug) and I noticed as I got them ready for bed that a mouse had left a gift of a pooh on one of the mats by my son’s bed. I quickly disposed of it.

Then…

A machine gun fire of thinking started going off in my head!

Now if you have read this blog before you will know that mouse pooh is an occasional occurrence in this house. – We’ve caught a few mice but the sneaky little creatures occasionally come back and leave the odd gift of pooh for us. – I don’t like it but I can very occasionally be dignified about it, bin it and not waste more than a few minutes time thinking about it.

Not that night! That night having been thinking about not being able to go to work, I now started to get interested in other negative thinking that happened to be passing through my head. And as Ami Chen Mills so eloquently says ‘Bad thoughts are like stray cats the more you feed them, the more they come back.’ Boy did I get interested in negative thoughts that happened to be passing through. It was like a machine gun going off in my head. – The implications of not being able to work; was my husband’s job secure or not; resentment about my husband’s job; the house is a mess and I can’t find a cleaner (the last one scraped all the settings off my oven! – yes they did!); followed by a stream of negative thinking about money and how I needed a holiday; and on and on it went!

As all this machine gun fire was going on in my head I was getting the kids ready for bed and reading them a story and I noticed that I wasn’t being very nice to them. They were doing their thing, and I was being impatient and a bit nasty. Then in a minute I realised that even though I was going through the motions of putting them to bed I wasn’t present with them. I was in my head with all the machine gun fire of thinking going off in it, and I wasn’t present to what was going on in the here and now. And I saw this and I apologised to them. I said I’m sorry mummy just realised she wasn’t being very nice to you because she was distracted thinking about things and getting herself upset. And once I had done that I was present and back in the room with them.

Life is a moment to moment experience. All there is is what is happening now in this moment. That’s it. The rest is our creation.

Before you ask, I was Ok for a few hours and then I got interested in my negative thinking again but the second time it felt more like a choice cos let’s face it sometimes its enjoyable to be in a bad mood especially when we know it’s coming from us. It’s like a child enjoying a tantrum but that’s for another blog post. Happy Monday everyone.

If anything I’ve written resonates with you and you are curious to find out more, please get in touch I’d love to hear from you.

Also if you’ve got kids and fancy joining us at a family gathering in the beautiful Lake District where you can hear more about the ideas expressed this blog post check out our 3 Principles Family Gathering.