Why does hunger abound at snack time, but magically wane at dinnertime?
Why do my children insist on using my nice makeup brushes to “paint” the house?
Why is it so much more fun to eat on the floor than at the table?
Why do I spend money on outdoor toys when my children choose to play in the flowerbeds?
Why do the older kids want to play with the baby toys and the babies want to play with the big kids’ toys?
Why can I never get to church on time?
Why in the world did somebody think it was a good idea to put white carpet in my dining room?
Why can I not keep flies out of my house? And why do they all magically disappear when I get out the fly swatter?
Why do my children not appreciate the beauty of nap time?
What were your motherhood musings this week?
So, I’ve been wondering. Who came up with the name “Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease”?? I mean, beyond the common cold, illnesses and diseases are typically given long, unpronounceable, scientific names. I have long complained of that inconvenience, but I now have a new appreciation for it. Given, Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease is usually a result of the Coxsackie virus, but we don’t go around calling it “Coxsackie”. We call it “Hand, Foot, and Mouth”. I personally think that the the name sounds rather primitive. I mean, is it just me or does it sound like I am declaring that we eat off of the floor with our feet and live with the cows? Anyway. I digress.
That said, Samuel (my 4 year old) came down with Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease last Monday. The poor little guy had sores lining his mouth and tongue for a solid week. In fact, a week ago we were in the ER at the local Children’s Hospital due to dehydration. We could not get him to drink for anything. And trust me we tried. We had great sympathy for the pain that he was in, but we struggled as parents to feel like we should be able to effectively communicate to him the necessity of drinking something.
In the midst of that turmoil, though, I was reminded of how even Adam and Eve had a moment where they didn’t heed God’s warnings, and He is the perfect parent. He had warned them of serious consequences that would result of them disobeying, but he had also given them a free will.
Too often I find myself blowing past the ways that free will impacts my relationship with my children. I get caught up in my desire for absolute obedience and I forget that my job is to teach them. If I fail to acknowledge in my parenting that my child has a free will, then I lose true effectiveness as a parent and fail to equip them for life. In day to day life, even when they are young, they are presented with decisions that only they can make. Am I going to listen to my mom when she asks me to pick up my room (even knowing the consequences of not obeying)? Am I going to eat my food or throw it on the floor? Am I going to read a book or draw a picture? Each decision has a consequence, good or bad. As parents, we have to walk our children through the process of learning how to make decisions and how to exercise their free will. It isn’t our job to control them, but to guide them.
The times when this is really hard as a parent is when they make the wrong decisions. While we may need to impose a logical consequence or have to stand by and watch them suffer through a natural consequence, we have to let go of the desire to control our children and remember that our role is to teach them and to walk with them.
We don’t always make it look pretty, but free will really is a beautiful thing.
My little family had our own run of marshmallow madness this weekend! Fun was had by all!
See the craft idea here!
We all have those days…or weeks. “Not Me” Monday was created by MckMama to give us an outlet to laugh at our own imperfections. Will you join me? When you are done here, you can head over to her blog and read about what everyone else has “not” been doing.
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In our home, even when we are sick, I am always diligent about making sure my kids don’t watch too much TV. We do creative activities like reading, drawing and simple resting. Therefore, I did not let my sick 4yo watch his favorite video 6 times in one day. Not me.
I bathe my children every night before bed. It is an important part of hygiene. So it couldn’t have been my 14mo that wasn’t bathed in well over a week or that I realized this upon catching a musty whiff when changing her diaper. I would never let her to go that long.
My entire house is perfectly childproofed. So it oculdn’t have been my toddler that I found eating English muffin remains out of the trashcan. No, not me.
In our family, we always pee in toilets. That is the only acceptable thing to do. Therefore, it couldn’t have been me who looked over to see my 4yo son take a break from playing and pee in the front yard. Never, ever, ever.
And I am fully researched on how sugar affects the immune system, so it wasn’t me who chose to do a craft with marshmallows when we were housebound due to sickness this week. Nope, not me!
What did you not do this week?
I officially launched Ideals to Life several weeks ago. This blog has been on my heart for months now and it is thrilling to see it come to life before my eyes.
But I have a confession to make.
After months of dreaming, brainstorming, designing and writing, I realized that I was acting in contradiction with the very heart of the blog: I was waiting to launch until it was perfect.
So what did I do? I confessed to my husband and friends, we all rolled in laughter, I gave myself a week to launch, for better or worse, and now here we are. I do not have my ideal two weeks of drafts written and ready to roll out, I do not yet have an “About me” page to tell you who I am, I do not have a good portrait to post on the “About me” page, I did not have Google Analytics running on the site for most of the first week, I have not yet created the category description page like I had planned, my personal blog idea (what you are reading now) was just beginning to develop, and my favorite camera lens is in currently being repaired (after my 1yo pulled my camera off of a chair and it did a face plant on the floor) thus greatly limiting my ability to take new photographs for the blog.
But here I am, with all my imperfections.
The purpose of having my personal blog here is to remind you, and to remind me, that life is messy. The application of ideals in our life is not to create, or even portray, a perfect life. It is simply to improve upon ourselves, to grow, to enhance the life of our family and to seek God. I hope that through my posts you learn to love the imperfections in your own life…and maybe even laugh at them.