As much as we all love your children, sometimes it is necessary for a mother to get some free time to herself. Not only will this help you to relax and unwind after the day’s events, but it also helps to re-energize you in preparation for as soon as you’re needed again by your children. In fact, squeezing in fun leisure activities throughout the week is a key ingredient to living a healthy lifestyle, not just for moms, but for everyone. Here we list a few of the quintessential “mom” activities that you can try when you have some time for yourself.

Cooking

Before we go any further, please don’t assume this means cooking hot pockets for the kids or anything like that. The idea behind cooking here is to let yourself try new things without the pressure of pleasing your entire family. To start, you can try cooking any number of new recipes that you find that look interesting to you personally. If you really want to be daring, you could even try deviating from the recipe a little bit. Or just try and create your own brand new recipe from scratch.

The key here is to take your time and have fun with it. Try to separate the ideas of cooking for fun and cooking for your family as much as possible while taking on this activity.

Exercise

Although this does take some real energy to do, exercising has the distinct advantage of stimulating yourself physically as well as mentally. Physically, exercising burns calories which leads to weight loss over time. And mentally the very fact that you are burning calories and sweating both help to release the stress in your bodies that have building up all day. This is a very good way to distract yourself from the struggles of daily life, especially if you really get into the exercising.

Some common exercises methods are jogging, running or even swimming if you have exercise to a pool. Women especially love doing Zumba, which is a fitness program that involves dancing to music with high-intensity movements that burn calories without you even realizing it. In order to get the most benefit out of exercising, we recommend exercising at least twice (but ideally three times) per week, for at least an hour each time. As long as you are feeling the burn in whatever you do, you will be using your time well.

Writing

There are many different styles of writing that you can do to fill out your free time. The most common form of writing by mothers is a daily journal, which not only helps them keep track of their children’s lives, but also their own. If not a daily journal, women sometimes just write in their journal for major events in their families lives, to maintain the memories long after they fade from our minds. If you are really tech-savvy you could even try placing your journal entries into a website and change the format of your writing to that of a blog. This is a great way to easily share with your friends and family what you are up to and how you are doing, without having to let each of them know individually.

However journals aren’t the only style of writing to choose from. Fiction is a very popular style as well, especially for mothers who may get bored with the daily grind. A subgenre of fiction that is often associated with women’s writing is the sexual fantasy fiction genre. This is where you fantasy various sexual events, either about yourself, or about some other third person, and it is a highly effective way of fulfilling your sexual needs if your time in the bedroom has been lackluster as of late, if not completely non-existent.

You can also choose to write about non-fiction topics, or even write down your private prayers that you make to God. Just about anything you write about is perfectly fine, as long as it is bringing you joy and relaxation.

Reading

Reading is a very popular activity for women as it is the perfect activity to wind down to at the end of your day. Reading is a simple activity that increases brain activity and keeps you occupied in an enjoyable way. Not only are there many great genres to choose from, but different methods of reading as well, especially in the technological age that we are living in today. You can read a traditional book with real physical pages that you have to physically turn. Or you can download books onto your eBook or E-reader to read that way. Or you can even read articles and novels straight off of your desktop computer.

A great tip for when reading is to brew a hot cup of coffee or make some hot tea to really cozy up and get into that relaxing state. This amplifies the effectiveness of reading as a leisure activity immensely.

Crafting

This last leisure time activity may be the most quintessential mom activity out there. Crafting lets you put your efforts into something colorful and fun for a few hours at a time. Common examples of crafting include things like knitting, crocheting, painting or drawing. One of the best parts about crafting is that you can actually create cool things for your friends and family. From beautiful paintings and drawings that you can hang in your house, to beautiful hand-knit hats and other articles of clothing that can actually be worn, crafting is the ultimate in short-term pleasure that can create long-term value as a result.

Just note that for a lot of these crafting activities you will probably need to invest some money into supplies, as well as spend some time learning how to do your specific craft activities. While some activities such as drawing or painting may be intuitive, in order to really get good at those activities, or to just learn the basics of more advanced crafting such as knitting or crocheting will take time to learn from the experts. Luckily, such tutorials can be found on YouTube and other sites, with videos easily showing you how it’s done so you can get right down to doing it for yourself.

Don’t Let Motherhood keep you from enjoying the little things

No matter how dedicated you are as a mother or wife, it is important not to let such dedication take over your life. Everybody needs a little bit of time for themselves, including mothers. Especially when you do everything you can to help and improve the lives of the people around you, you should never forget to spend time doing leisure activities like the ones mentioned above. Because enjoying the little things in life truly is an essential part of leading a healthy, happy lifestyle!