A cup a day keeps the monsters away

Today is our first day of homeschooling "officially." I submitted our letter of intent to the state and now I need to withdraw the kids from the school they've been attending and we're ready to go. I also ordered the books we'll be using to start our curriculum. The first big shipment is due tomorrow, and we'll have more trickling in for the next few weeks. Fortunately, only one came back as backordered, and it's the B book to an A/B set, so we'll be good for a while without it anyway. Phew!

Additionally, I assure you I am not shirking my children. Ansel is sitting here working on an alphabet worksheet and Kadin is working on maps. We are rolling slowly along. I'm expecting some bumps and some chaos for a while, but we'll get the hang of it. I am a little intimidated by all the books I have coming my way, though. I'm going to need some quiet time to sit down and go through them and plot out how to get that whatever point I think we need to make it to by May and then divide through the weeks until then, and, and, and....

So what I will give you, quickly, is a small personal victory of mine. And it's about coffee.

I used to drink a lot of coffee. Really. a whole lot of coffee. So much coffee, it's hard to even say how much I drank on a given day. I wasn't exactly counting it, I was just consuming the heck out of it.

I guess, on an average day, there were probably about three cups in the morning. And then another cup in the afternoon. Sometimes some black tea. On especially challenging days, there'd be an energy drink. Maybe two. And if I left the house, I'd likely end up at Starbuck's, where my usual order was a doppio expresso with a pump of caramel and a venti iced coffee with milk, lightly sweetened. Oh my.

I cut back gradually. It was less painful than I had expected. I got it down to about two cups in the morning when I decided to cut the sugar, too. In years past, I had consumed my coffee with International Delight French Vanilla. It was lovely and it was convenient. When we switched to more whole foods, I moved to half and half with cane sugar. Then I tried using the MyFitnessPal calorie counter for a while, and I hated seeing my allotted calories getting sucked away in coffee. So I took the sugar out. I've actually grown to like it!

My daily coffee intake is a lot more reasonable now. I have a cup of coffee in the morning. That's it! But I promise, you will pry that final cup out of my cold, dead hands. I love it too much to let it go. I value it. It matters to me. The routine, the smell, all of it. It is here to stay.