Okay, most topics are my favorite topic, but as someone with the stature and lifestyle of a Hobbit, I will say that food is pretty much my jam. Yes, that was probably a slather too far, but I am fond of toasting myself.Ugh, I will stop now.

If the sun happens to come out during the final days of March, you will almost always find me outside with a pile of winter tree detritus burning and a rake in my hand. I'm actually quite curious if some wayward creature is going to plop through here and lecture me about the evils of burning wood's waste like has happened in years past. It's one of my favorite spring happenings! In North Idaho you either burn the wood's duff now or you burn up completely later. I don't know about you, but I don't mind a bit of raking and burning compared to my entire farm becoming an inferno due to improper land stewardship.

Even though I have been home for a couple days, thoughts of the Western Regional Junior Clay Target Championship are still fresh in my well-traveled mind. Now me, I am just Mom, I am present to provide logistics and support. All the hotel accommodations, vehicle concerns, financial stuff, and food are my realm. I make sure everything in background is lined out, wrangle friends and family (and occasionally run interference with parents for the hubs), and enjoy the show.

Holy mileage!Since last Wednesday, I haven't sat down other than to sleep. And that is not hyperbole. It's been an adventure!What am I blabbering about, and why was I gone from posting for almost two weeks? Well, my son competed in the Western Regional Clay Championships in Las Vegas, which is 1134 miles from my house. It's fairly easy to fly with a firearm in the US, but ammo is another story, and we had to take all of the team's ammo, so we had several thousand shotgun rounds to deal with, so, like last year, we drove.

For the first half of the day, I was deep in the world of DBT Distress Tolerance skills training and Case Study crafting. For the most part I am adoring my mental health clinician training, but a lot of the time it's more than draining because my brain is fighting to disseminate what is actual education and what is societal indoctrination.

I spent most of the morning doing a deep dive into Internal Family Systems, also known as IFS. IFS is a type of therapy that asserts we are all made up of a family, an internal system, of multiple parts, and when we experience trauma, certain parts get stuck in protector mode and cause us dysregulation out of a mechanism of adaptive protection. Through developing a non judgmental relationship between your Self and your parts, you can execute healthy Self-leadership overall and thrive as a emotionally regulated person.