Learning the Hard Way

In high school, the summer before my junior year, I had a three month relationship that my parents knew was going to crash and burn before it even started.  It had all the wonderful things teenage melodramas need:  A boyfriend who was still in love with my best friend, a friend who was still in love with my boyfriend, the boyfriend who had the emotional maturity of a gnat, teenage hormones, and no worldly experience for any of the teenagers involved to say:  "This is going to end very, very badly with many, many tears and lots of landline phone calls."

At some point while I was crying my broken heart out on my dad's lap, I had an inkling that he had a premonition that this relationship was going to last about as long as the latest boy band.  I asked him why he let me do it, knowing it was going to have such a tragic ending.  My dad looked me in the eye and said, "I struggled with it, but in the end, I knew you had to make your own mistakes.  I can't live your life for you. It's the hardest part of being a parent...knowing your kids are going to fail and letting them do it anyway."

When my dad explained his reasoning to me, I was shell-shocked.  I heard the lesson but thought his timing was rather lousy, given everything *I* was already dealing at the time.  Major break-up, here! Hello?!?  So, I filed it away under "things parents say to their kids when they think they are being helpful" and went about my life.

Now that Richard and I are raising two middle schoolers, I finally understand what my dad was trying to teach me:  It isn't easy to let our kids knowingly make mistakes.  However, if they are mistakes the kids can afford to make, with no serious consequences except to themselves, I am learning to bite my tongue.  It's hard. I hate it.  I don't always know when to let them fail and when to offer help, so sometimes I jump in too soon or not soon enough.

I am learning that kids need to be able to safely fail at things so they can learn how to handle the disappointments in life. It makes the successes they will experience that much more triumphant.   We can't save our kids from every curveball thrown at them, but we can equip them emotionally and mentally.  We can be there to cheer them on when life is going well as well as comfort them when it is not going quite their way.

As parents, we can teach them to learn from mistakes, rather then letting mistakes define who they are as a person.   It's a continuous process, but if we want children who are not afraid to explore the world, it is one well worth the effort.

Social (Media) Awareness

I like Social Media. A Lot. In fact, I read books about how to use it more and how it is impacting our society. I'm equally fascinated/startled by the privacies we are willing to give up in order to immerse people into our lives at the expense of letting advertisers mine thier way through our digital homes. That being said, I share much of my life through status updates and pictures on facebook. I chose facebook because Instagram freaks me out with their lack of privacy controls. I like twitter, but it isn't my thing. I don't feel home there. I also have this blog which I am horrible at updating. Like many people before me who found something a little too enticing for their own good, there was a point where I felt facebook had more control over me than I did over it, so I walked away from it for awhile, reassessed my priorities, then returned wiser for the experience. If you know how much time I'm spending on social media and it bothers you, the problem is yours, not mine. I love sharing my life and the support that is freely given and offered. I have been able to interact with my family and friends in a way that would not have been possible years ago. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to see pictures of events that would otherwise have been missed. I am not going to apologize for choosing to live an interactive life. It brings me an incredible amount of blessings and joy to share the adventures of family life. It is my fondest hope you join me for the journey.

Growing Imperfection

Rich and I spent the better part of today ripping out our failed container garden in the front of the house.

Before we started, we knew it was going to require trip(s) to garden centers around town.  Of course, our Princess of Color could not be left behind, so she came along with us, offering her opinions about flowers the flowers we should plant by her senses rather then our overall garden design.

Since we are still new to any kind of gardening, I cannot fault her aesthetic.

Lauren was so inspired by the first place we went, she just had to plant a flower planter of her own.

I thought long and hard about letting her do it.  If I said, "Yes." it meant that I would be the helper, not the leader of the project.  I would have to stifle all my perfectionist tendencies and let her place the flowers however she wanted to place them in planter.  This sounds really great on paper...let the kid put her flowers in the planter...they are just flowers.  But be honest with yourself.  We all have our own way of doing things.  We like things just so and letting other people "interfer" with our system is a hard thing to do.  We have to let go of our control and trust that their way and their system is just as okay as ours.  Even children deserve the  respect to safely explore their world in a way that is different than ours, but it is not easy to give up the control to which we so tightly cling in order to keep our world secure.  

I trusted my daughter.  I let her pick out  pink, purple, and white petunias as well as some yellow/orange geraniums to split between to big planters I already owned.  I bought more potting soil.  I stayed silent and showed her how to carefully transfer little plants to the big planter.  We had a blast together!  

Do the planters look the way I would have put them together?  No.  Does it matter?  Not a single bit.

I gave up the control, trusted my daughter, and realize we planted flowers, memories, laughter, and love.

Triage

When you put your kids in activities that will require physicality, they will inevitably become injured at some point on the field.

To be perfectly honest, it took my husband sitting on me multiple times for me to not be the mom running onto the field screaming, "What happened to my baby?"  

To be even more honest, in most cases, my "baby" was (and is) usually fine.

To be brutally honest, it would have been more traumatic for my child to have me run onto the field checking them over, then having their coach dust them off and (when required) bandage them up.

In the few times they've come to me for treatment, I have learned to how to triage*:

1.  Look at the injury and assess if it needs to be treated by a professional.  If not:

2.  Apply ice, band-aids, and reassurance.  Send them back to their coach.  If the child refuses to go:

3.  Tell injured child I am so sorry that the injury is so bad that they will be unable to play video games/ride bikes/do whatever kind of fun thing that was planned that day.

4.  If #3 does not produce a miraculous and instantaneous recovery, I then reassess whether or not we need to go to the doctor.

*This is not professional medical advice.  I am only a professional mom.  Results may vary at your house.  

**Disclaimer:  I did this when my kids were just starting out in sports and wanted to quit every time they were bumped or received a little scratch when they fell down.  There are injuries that have to be taken very seriously right away.  I have four kids in numerous sports who receive medical attention when they need it, as soon as they need it.**

A Tool for Every Job

The night before the big day of  Lauren's ear piercing appointment Brandon did not feel well, which started a round of "take every ones temperature whether they are sick or not."  

Jokingly, Jonathon said, “take Mom’s temp, she doesn’t look so great...”  (Thanks kiddo!)  

Brandon, who was deemed to be in perfect health, took my temperature and discovered that I had a fever of 101.8F!  It explained why I didn’t look so great and had been feeling even worse.  However, it was not going to help Lauren make her much anticipated appointment.

Fortunately, Rich agreed to take Lauren to her big event.  She was thrilled and excited.  I was feverish, weary, and wary.  Rich was non-pulsed and once again initiated into the world of all things girl.  Father and daughter arrived home untraumatized.

The weekend happened to be Halloween and I rallied enough to take the kids Trick-or-Treating, only to pay for it Monday morning with a migraine.  Rich had to help Lauren manage the morning cleaning of her new earrings.  I did tell Lauren that if her dad had a really hard time to come get me and I would manage it.  

I did hear one yell from the bathroom but it was short, so I fell asleep.  I should have investigated because an outraged Lauren practically flew into my bedroom after school yelling:

"I LOST A EARRING!  I TOLD HIM NOT TO USE THE PLIERS THIS MORNING!..BUT DID HE LISTEN??  NOOOO!!  ...at which point Lauren commenced into more yelling, ranting, and sobbing...

Apparently, the "yell" I failed to investigate was Rich taking the back off of one of Lauren's earrings off with a pliers because his fingers were too big to manage such a little piece of jewelry and he did not want to bother me when I felt so poorly.  Lauren did not see things from her father's perspective.  All she felt was a pinched ear that was already tender ear compounded by the additional pain of a newly lost earring.

We managed to console Lauren, find a replacement starter earring, and at the end of a slightly painful day for her, teach Lauren that her Daddy loved her enough to help her with something new to him.