Day 15: These special talents of mine...

We are rolling into the holiday season, which means there's a lot of holly jolly stuff happening in the next 6 weeks.  For our family, this also includes some birthdays and a trip halfway across the country.  As we head into this busy season, I'm grateful that I'm good at managing mental load.  I'm good at keeping track of tasks through lists, and for the most part I'm good at moving through these lists pretty efficiently.  Both of my parents role modeled this for me, for which I am grateful.  And I'm tremendously grateful that I have more time and bandwidth to devote to mental load since Kenny is earning all the household income right now, which makes an enormous difference. 

My organizational abilities are hit or miss - we do not have a particularly organized house, for example.  But when it comes to the mental load of running the household (things like meal planning, signing the kids up for activities on time, doing all the school and special needs paperwork, etc.), I'm grateful that keeping track of tasks comes pretty naturally and doesn't feel like a huge burden.  This absolutely does not mean that mistakes are never made and that things are never missed, and actually by naming this skill in this post I'm fearful that I'm about to miss some huge thing - but I don't actually think the universe works this way, and I'm still grateful that things with mental load have gone pretty well up to now.