Migraine Awareness Month #4: June is Bustin Out All Over

Today's prompt is:

Migraine Awareness Month #4: "June Is Bustin' Out All Over"  What's the best tip you can offer others for having some summer fun despite Migraines?

I have offered up a lot of tips over the years.  Most of them practical. We've talked about making a Migraine bag that's packed and ready for your next attack, packing a bag for small children so it's easy to keep them busy during your next Migraine.  I've talked about traveling with your meds, minimizing triggers while traveling, and, well the list goes on and on.

My best tip to having some summer fun despite having chronic Migraines is this:

Plan to be impulsive!

Being an impulsive chronic Migraineur takes some durned careful planning (as you'll see at the end of this post).  Stop and think about it... if you were to get a good day to spend with your family, what would you do? Most really amazing things take planning, even if it's just a little bit.  The thing is, to have an amazing time we Migraineurs need to be able to drop everything and go, and unless you live alone with an unlimited bank account, that's pretty tough to wrangle unless you..... plan for it.

Here are some impulsive things our family has done:

• Impromptu barbecue with swimming and games in the back yard.

• Taken the family to the lake to swim.

• Danced in the rain and played in the mud in the yard.

• Camped overnight nearby.

• Gone boating.

• Gone to the racetrack.

• Had water fights.

• Visited a museum in Kansas City.

• Had raucous family game nights.    

• Team painted a room of the house.

• Crawdad hunting in the mud.   

These things might sound like everyday activities to many families, but when I'm stuck in bed more days than not, these were really big deals for us.  What made them even better was that I had an idea at the beginning of the summer some of the things we might like to do if I got a good day.  We took the time to buy the supplies or put away a little cash that we needed to do these ahead of time, so when a good day hit me, all we had to do was grab and go. 

 

Try making a list with your family of fun activities you can do.  When a good day hits, grab it, pick something and GO!

I guarantee you that some of the best times we've ever had with friends and family came when we impulsively did something fun. We still talk about some of them like:

  

• Hubs singing karaoke with friends - "Hot Blooded" will never be the same for any of us!

• The crawdad hunt where we ended up COVERED in thick gray mud. The neighbors even took pictures, but were laughing so hard they didn't realize there was no film in the camera      

• All the games of croquet with neighbors in the yard. We sometimes changed the rules and actually wore the set out

• The many water fights we had while bathing horses where we soaked each other so badly our pants nearly fell off  

• The day we went to the racetrack, decided to buy a racehorse, and did!  This was topped by the first race she won days later, and I actually got to BE there!   (I've got the piled on hair behind the pink shirt behind the banner. The rest of the family and our partner is with me)

Alright, I admit, adding a racehorse to the farm was maybe a bit beyond impulsive, lol. (See the story here) However, I must digress here and say that the trip was my anniversary *gift*, the purchase took 3 days to happen, she became my Hubs' horse and for the first time ever he took an interest in what was going on out at the barns.  Just because it was impulsive doesn't mean it wasn't veeeeeerrrrry carefully thought out and planned ;)

What are some of your best impulsive fun memories with your family?   

National Migraine Awareness Month is initiated by the National Headache Foundation. The Blogger's Challenge is initiated by www.FightingHeadacheDisorders.com.

To help raise awareness about Migraine, please Tweet this post with the hash tags #NMAM and #NMAMBC and share it on your Facebook page. Thank you!