<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"I feel rotten. Seriously rotten. I mean &amp;quot;hammered death in a rusty bucket&amp;quot; rotten. I&amp;#039;m not sleeping well, my joints ache, I&amp;#039;ve got constant headaches and my neck and shoulders have more knots than a navy shipyard. It&amp;#039;s all stress, too, every single bit of it. I&amp;#039;ve got a lot on my plate right now - divorce mediation, my workload doubling at the day job, David&amp;#039;s upcoming IEP (that&amp;#039;s his yearly educational plan evaluation, for special needs kids), a handful of things that have broken down or in need of repair around the house, my car is making a weird sound when I back up, I can&amp;#039;t afford to pay my cable bill, and that&amp;#039;s just the stuff my frantic brain can think of off the top of my head.  I&amp;#039;m not feeling too great about everything right now, and it&amp;#039;s really starting to affect me a lot more than I&amp;#039;d like. I spent most of this past weekend forcing myself to do the bare necessities when what I really wanted to do was climb under a blanket on the couch with a heating pad and pretend I don&amp;#039;t have any problems. I was a complete stick-in-the-mud with my kids, too. It was a beautiful fall weekend and we should have been out hiking, biking, maybe visiting a museum a park or something. I just didn&amp;#039;t have the energy. The best I could do was pumping up the air mattress on Saturday night and declaring a living room campout. Thank God my kids are easily pleased. I need some inexpensive and relatively easy ideas for de-stressing, preferrably things I can do with the kids in tow. How do you handle it when the world is ganging up on you?  [Follow Ellie on Twitter and Facebook] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/relationships/dating-marriage/a46641/what-are-your-stress-relievers/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=WDY&link=-SMT-WDY>