So much has happened in our lives the past 6 months.  We returned from 3+ unbelievably rewarding months in Italy and came home to gardens and fall and wedding planning and holidays and then the actual wedding!!!  It was a wonderfully rich and busy few months.

I tend to get caught up in some sort of vacuum when there is a very large event or activity on the horizon.  That specific thing tends to become a gigantic focus that slows down all of my other goals and has me feeling overwhelmed by basically everything, including the things that I love to do, like cooking and decorating and entertaining.  Why is that?

After our daughter and son-in-law’s beautiful wedding things were clearer to me,  I was able to begin to focus on figuring out what the things were that make me happy; things that I needed to make sure were a daily part of my life.  I began searching the web and reading suggestions from different bloggers.  Many have great ideas and planning tools, but what I finally realized after reading a few excerpts was that I needed to determine the things that were important in my life, and realize that they needed to come first.

There are many things that are urgent in our day to day lives – and there is a difference between urgency and importance.  One site that I accessed is Maria Forleo’s site ( http://www.marieforleo.com/2015/01/prioritize/)  for women who want to create a business.  Now, I am not in that group of wanting to create a business, but I like her energy and a lot of what she has to say does relate to life in general.  She gives a simple video description of understanding what is urgent vs what is important.

Several other sites that I found online suggested thinking about and listing the things that are important ….so I came up with these three things – health/exercise….blogging….and continuing with my study of Italian.  Those are the three things I want to establish as consistent parts of my daily life.  I felt really good after I did that – more focused and happier. I’m hoping that making these things part of my daily life on a consistent basis will help me focus better when bigger things are on my horizon.  (Family is of course always important, and it will always take precedence.)

The health part of this plan will be the most challenging because my husband and I love to cook and we love to eat!  We eat as much organic and local as we can, and this time of year in northwest New Jersey the local choices are pretty much not available, except for some meats and cheeses.  While in Italy this past summer we were able to walk to one of any hundreds of restaurants in Florence each night – we would discover a little gem on our walks during the day and make sure that we returned at night for dinner.  The choices were never ending, and we loved every second of it.  The foods were local and fresh, and so healthy!  The portions are not huge like here in the states, and doggie bags are not the norm.

stuffed zucchini flowers

Exercise right now includes using the treadmill and practicing yoga on my own or in a class as well as bi-weekly TRX workouts with a fantastic personal trainer.  My Italian lessons are small group and will begin again on Tuesday mornings with the beautiful Chiara.  I’m laughing right now because I spent the most amount of time talking about food – see, I told you it was the most challenging thing in my life to manage!

Ciao, Bella!