ReHealth Dads

Last Monday, I checked my blood sugar and told myself I needed to get things back on track. Again.

Most mornings I mean it. But by evening, when I am stressed and exhausted, I can end up making the same choices I wanted to change that morning.

There have been good days too. I think that is part of what makes this pattern easier to accept. I have not stopped trying, and there is usually a reason things went off track.

But when the same difficult evening happens several times a week, I have to question whether I can keep treating it as an exception.

Last month, I wrote about having zero tolerance for leaving my blood sugar unmanaged. Rereading it made me uncomfortable because I could not say I had followed through as much as I intended to.

I am not expecting perfect decisions. I want to stop letting another rough night become permission to put my health off until tomorrow.

I wrote more about this in Some Risks Need Zero Tolerance. Link in comments.

Last night, my wife was ordering Jollibee and asked if I wanted anything.

I had eaten dinner around 4 p.m., but later that night I smoked, got hungry again, and decided I was going to eat something.

This is usually where things can go sideways for me. Once I break the plan, it becomes easy to say screw it and make a few more bad decisions.

But I turned down Jollibee, made eggs and cheese with crackers, and stayed out of the chocolate stash.

It was not the night I had planned, but one decision did not have to ruin the rest of them.

With how stressful life has been lately, I am realizing I need to spend less time expecting perfect decisions and get better at making reasonable ones when things do not go according to plan.

I wrote more about this in this week’s article. Link in comments.

“I often associate risk with fear.”

That’s what I wrote during a writing exercise last week.

But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. I moved to South Korea without speaking Korean. I’ve changed careers three times, bought a home two weeks after getting laid off, and became a father again in my late 40s.

I’ve taken plenty of risks, and I’m grateful for many of them.

Then I thought about a risk I’ve been far too comfortable accepting.

My blood sugar has been much higher than I want it to be. I know the long-term risks. I know what has worked for me before. Yet I’ve kept telling myself I can turn things around whenever I decide to.

Maybe I don’t need to be less afraid of risk. I need to pay more attention to which risks I’m willing to accept.

I wrote more about that in this week’s article. Link in comments.

I spent part of Labour Day thinking three years ahead.

The weekend had been rough. My six-year-old son got sick right before school started, meals and medication were a struggle, and by Monday I
was drained.

Then I took him to the lake.

I watched him walk barefoot through the wet sand and throw rocks into the water. Later that weekend, I sat with my newborn, smiled at him, and watched him smile back.

Those small moments made me realize something.

I don’t have to wait three years for life to look different before I can start experiencing parts of the future I’m trying to build.

That became this week’s article. Link in comments.

Last Sunday we dropped my mother in law off at the airport.

She had been staying with us since just before our second son was born, and suddenly it was just my wife and me again trying to figure out evenings with a newborn and an autistic six year old.

One thing became obvious pretty quickly. If I waited until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. to eat dinner, I already knew where that would lead. Less patience, worse food choices, staying up too late, and starting the next day with less energy.

So I am trying something that sounds a little ridiculous. I am eating dinner at 4:00 p.m.

A client recently mentioned something Tony Robbins calls the two millimeter shift. The idea is that sometimes a very small adjustment can change what happens next.

That got me thinking about how often I look for a big solution when maybe one small change earlier in the day can make everything that follows a little easier.

That became the idea behind this week’s article.

Link in comments.

My blood pressure hit 155 over 98 on Monday.

It came after a simple attempt to wash my son's feet turned into a broken shower shelf, several hits to my chest and wrist, and me sitting alone in my office trying to calm down.

By 4:30 the next morning, he needed me again. Later, I spent about 25 minutes walking around the house with him on my shoulders, feeding him breakfast one bite at a time over my head because that was the only way he would eat.

I love my son more than I can explain. That does not change the fact that some days this is incredibly hard.

This week made me realize I have been thinking too much about what to do when my patience battery hits zero, and not enough about preventing it from getting there so often.

So I am starting small. I am protecting Friday afternoons and giving myself a few hours to recover.

I wrote more about caregiver burnout and what these two days forced me to confront.

Link in comments.

Yesterday, I finally finished something that had been sitting on my to-do list for four months.

I kept waiting for six or eight uninterrupted hours to work on it, but that kind of day just doesn’t exist for me right now.

So I broke the project into 15 to 30 minute tasks and started chipping away whenever I had a small window.

What surprised me was how much better I felt before it was even finished. The project was finally moving, and that alone made a huge difference.

Yesterday, I checked the last box.

I wrote more about what those small wins taught me about time, progress, and the mental peace that comes from getting things moving.

Link in comments.

Last Saturday, my son and I spent more than six hours together, and we both stayed regulated the entire time.

My wife was sick, we had no respite support, and my mom wasn’t available. So I took him out for the afternoon and decided not to bring my earbuds or try to squeeze in any work.

We got lunch, washed the windows together while getting gas, stopped at the train station, and spent two and a half hours at an almost empty indoor playground.

At one point, he kept circling around in a push cart with this huge smile on his face.

I remember thinking, this is why I do it all.

Nothing about parenting him was easier that day. I was just fully present.

It made me realize that sometimes I make hard days even harder by trying to be somewhere else mentally.

I wrote more about that in this week’s article. Link in comments.