On Mondays my aunt lets us come over after quiet time to play. We stay all the way through baths and getting kids ready for bed so we just have to load everyone in the car, drive home, brush teeth, and put them to bed! She even makes us dinner! Speaking of dinner, does anyone else's toddlers eat hardly anything??? My 21 month old barely eats enough to keep a bird alive. At least the pediatrician is never worried but seriously, how does she get by with so little food?? I try not to think of the "starving kids in China" I heard about when I was young when I'm tossing yet another plate of uneaten food in the garbage.
Anyway, I used to go for a run Monday afternoons when Barb had the kids but now that I'm running mostly in the mornings I get to use that time for a coffee date with myself and a book and sometimes God shows up. I used to do these dates all the time when I was pre-kid. One job I had required me to take an hour lunch break but I always ate while at work so would go to Starbucks, EVERY DAY. Wow, I can't relate to that now. So even the 40 minutes I carved out for my coffee date yesterday was pretty glorious.
Last week I started reading Desperate by Sally Clarkson. Since I've been in newborn survival or pregnancy with infant survival or newborn with toddler survival or pregnancy with infant and toddler survival or newborn with toddler and preschooler survival, I feel like I skipped over a lot of the non-survival parenting stuff. It's as if I'm just now getting out of 3 years of survival and adjusting to new baby or getting ready for the next baby mode. So this book speaks to my soul and a bunch of stuff I feel like I missed the opportunity to figure out sooner.
Things like... my kids are naturally sinful so why would I be surprised when their first response to a frustrating sibling is to hit? Hello?!! Why did this not dawn on me sooner? Sally (the author of the book) talks about how her husband asked her, "when did you learn enough to stop sinning?" Um... you never do! So why would I expect my kids to act like they have when they are far less experienced at making right decisions than us adults? This doesn't mean I shouldn't teach them. But I feel like it takes the pressure off expecting them to act right when it will be far more natural to act wrong and it's the right stuff that I need to help them learn. Sally writes about how our days will tend more towards chaos than order.
Yesterday morning during my run I was also reflecting more on the idea that we are the right parents for our kids. Not someone else. I know that God knew of me before the creation of the world but hadn't really thought about the fact that he also knew about my kids. It's kind of cool (and scary) to think that the combination of me and Mark with Millie, Sophie and Chloe was supposed to happen. That our combination of parenst/kids/siblings is the BEST fit for all of us. That even though I'm not as good at ... (fill in the blank) as the next mom doesn't mean anything. I'm the best mom for my kids just by being me. But when I also think about how much I sin during the day it breaks my heart to think of how that will impact my kids. I will mess them up no matter what I do. According to the wise thoughts of some older experienced parents I know.
At the moment my older 2 are watching Monsters, Inc with their yayas (pacifiers), cuddled under a blanket on the couch. This is how we do breakfast every morning. Chocolate milk (Sophie, the non-eater, gets Carnation Instant Breakfast), cinnamon waffles or mini pancakes and a full-length movie on the couch. Because of all the things I'm realizing about letting us be us and not other families, I've decided that a movie in the morning is okay and I should not feel bad about it ;) Chloe, who was on the couch next to me is now upstairs in bed. She is my non-schedule-able kid. I may have thought I could figure out baby routines and get them scheduled before Chloe came along. She's over 5 months and I still can't figure it out! So we just flow with the day and keep the things that we can (the conditions in her bed, etc) as predictable as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment