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Children,Parenting

One of the Joys of Motherhood

posted on : March 12, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 0 Comment

I recorded the following incident in my journal.  “As I was getting dressed (my daughter) said to me “Mom, why is your tummy so big after having a baby?  Now (this daughter, who was 5 years old) had been saying several things lately of this nature.  She had just told me the day before that she was worried about me dying because I “wasn’t getting any younger and was looking pretty old.”  So when she said this about my tummy I said ” You know, if you’re not careful, you’re going to hurt my feelings.”  Well, you could just see from her face the thoughts flying through her brain trying to rectify the situation.  Then she said, “You’re not fat mom, you just look fat.  You just look fat.”  I still chuckle about this from time to time. The innocence of a child.”  That was the end of my journal entry and even now when I think about this it makes me laugh.  Children are delightful and a joy to have and you never know what they are going to say.  This particular daughter is one of the kindest people I know, and the great thing is she is now expecting her first baby and well, I think turn-about-is-fair-play!

Children

Fifteen Minute Warning

posted on : February 26, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 0 Comment

When my kids were little and they were enjoying an activity, as it neared time to leave whatever we were doing, I would give a fifteen-minute warning and then a five-minute warning.  I found that if I suddenly said “well, it’s time to go home” I got tantrums and fighting because my kids needed time to transition.  They needed time to wrap their heads around the fact that they were going to have to leave something they were liking and having fun doing.  Now as adults they laugh at memories of being at the pool or park with me shouting “Fifteen-minute warning” and then again, “five-minute warning.”  It was kind of awkward for me to make a spectacle of myself shouting like that but the result was no tantrums and no fighting, and cooperative kids.

Children,Husband,Life

Desert Cows

posted on : February 1, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 2 Comments

Many years ago, in an effort to be more providential, I decided I would use our powdered milk from our food storage instead of letting it go to waste which I had been doing.  It was a hassle to mix it and I didn’t like the taste of it so I had rarely used it. Through experimenting I did find that if I mixed it up at night and it got really cold and used it on cereal it was passable, and actually hard to tell it wasn’t fresh.  Even at that some of my kids didn’t want to try it.  So one night my husband was mixing up the powdered milk and he told the kids that this milk came from desert cows and that’s why it was dry and we had to add water to it.  He explained that there’s not very much water in the desert for the cows to drink so it came out powdery, and of course he was just having fun with our kids not thinking anyone would really believe him.   Well, our kids were fascinated by this and the next day my then 5-year-old said to me “mom, I want some of that desert milk” and then everyone else wanted to try it too.  After that the kids started calling it desert milk which made it a lot more fun than calling it powdered milk.  Seems like a little humor and creativity made even powdered milk something desirable.

Children,Parenting

A Lasting Gift

posted on : January 20, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 2 Comments

Many years ago I taught the Bee Hives in the Young Women’s program, a calling I loved.  I learned to love each of those girls and thoroughly enjoyed being with them.  One Sunday, on Father’s Day, I asked each girl how she knew her father loved her.  There was one response I particularly remember.  She  said “I know my dad loves me because he likes to spend time with me.”  I have thought about this response over the years.  I knew her father and he was a busy man.  He owned his own business, had busy church callings and had 5 other children beside her and yet she knew he loved her because he liked spending time with her.  And interesting to me is that he didn’t spend time with her while he was on his phone, watching TV or being distracted in numerous ways because she knew he LIKED to spend time with her.  He was really present when they were together and he conveyed the message that he really enjoyed being with her.  What a wonderful gift he gave her, and this is something I need to be better at.

Life,Parenting

It Doesn’t Matter

posted on : January 17, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 4 Comments

When I was a young mother I wanted to be a perfect parent, or at least appear to be perfect with perfect kids. I was often exacting and demanding thinking that their lives reflected on me as a parent.  I dressed my kids well and on Sundays at church they had to have on clean, cute shoes with matching socks and of course hair accessories that matched their clothing.  When something didn’t go exactly how I wanted it to my mother-in-law would say “it doesn’t matter” and I would think “IT DOES TOO MATTER!”  As time went on I battled my kids over these and other unimportant, silly things and caused a lot of disharmony and strife in our home, and I eventually learned that my mother-in-law was right, it didn’t matter.  As teens some of my kids would wear mismatched socks and I learned to think “at least they have socks on” and then my youngest got a little older and she won’t wear socks at all.  I learned again to think “well, at least she has shoes on.”  Most of the things I stressed about with my children were unimportant and trivial while I often missed the big picture, that they were caring, good people who loved each other and wanted to make the world a better place.  As an older parent I realize there is no such thing as a perfect parent and if there was, certainly the standard wouldn’t be measured by shoes and socks.

Husband,Parenting

Differences in Parenting

posted on : January 12, 2018 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 2 Comments

My husband and I haven’t always agreed on child rearing methods and practices.  He is more lenient, kinder and if our kids came to him asking for money he had his wallet out asking them how much they wanted before they even finished asking him for it.  He believes, and rightly so, that you treat a person as you want them to become and you just love them.  I believe that’s important too but that child rearing needs rules such as everyone has jobs to do in a family which allows people to feel good about contributing, being a valued and important member of the family and teaches them to work.  If they wanted to have some extra money, I had a lot of extra jobs they could do to earn it themselves. He feels that rules are important too but that you mostly lead by example and kids learn from what they see their parents doing, and of course he’s right again because kids do learn from what you do and say. He is a hard worker, he’s honest and faithful to responsibilities and commitments and so our kids will learn to be also (and they have). I think children and teens earn trust, respect and privileges, especially as they grow older and as our children grew older he thought that they just got more privileges because they were getting older.  I think that by giving kids everything they want they develop a sense of entitlement.  He once told me that he naturally deferred to how he was raised, that his parent treated him with respect and love and he just always wanted to measure up.  I have pointed out that he was always a good kid, that he didn’t lie to his parents and steal from them to feed a growing drug habit or to just buy something they wanted.  That he didn’t sneak out after his parents went to bed to meet up with his friends, that he wasn’t doing illegal things when he was with them and that he was morally clean, and most importantly that he didn’t have mental health issues that clouded his thinking. We basically approached child rearing from very different viewpoints.

If we ever had disagreements it was usually about how to handle a problem with one of our children.  And sometimes I would be really mad at him but through it all, I always tried to remember that he loved our kids just as much as I did and that he wasn’t trying to be difficult or stubborn but that he truly thought that how he wanted to solve the problem was the best way to do it.  Remembering this helped me to focus on the issue, to listen better to what he had to say and to try to understand him and then to compromise.  In compromising we tried to combine some of his ideas and some of mine.  Usually we ended up with a better way to deal with the problem.  Sometimes when there could be no compromise, that it had to be one way or the other we went with the one who felt the strongest about the issue and sometimes we just took turns doing it the way one of us wanted. And I have also tried to focus on that he was an involved parent, that he was there physically and emotionally, he didn’t defer everything to me and take the easier path of noninvolvement.  He loves our kids just as much as I do.

Parenting

All Singing the Same Song

posted on : December 9, 2017 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 2 Comments

One Monday evening, when we were doing Family Home Evening, we were singing “I am a Child of God.” My eight children and my husband and myself were singing but each one was singing in a different key, different pace and different style.  Some finished before others singing with great volume and flair while others were singing softly at their own pace, and some were actually singing the song the way it was written to be sung.  It created a great, amazing cacophony.  As I looked around and listened to the sound it occurred to me that this was a perfect analogy for my family.  We were all singing the same song-our family goals are basically the same, but each one is singing the song in his or her own way adding to our very imperfect choir, his or her sound. Each voice is valued and important to the choir just like they are to our family.  We love each one of our children and his or her unique personality and value the contribution they make to our family, even if sometimes one of us is singing off key!

Parenting

Stress in Parenting

posted on : November 17, 2017 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 4 Comments

You can imagine that with eight children it was often noisy and stressful at our house.  None of my children were quiet, laid back people and they learned to talk louder than the other person in the family talking in hopes that they would be heard above the crowd. Often when I would be dealing with one child I would have 2-4 other children trying to talk to me at the same time.  I did try to explain many times to them the concept of waiting for their turn to talk to me, of how it actually took longer to help their brother of sister because they were talking to me too and so they ended up waiting longer, and just the politeness not talking to others until they were finished with what they were doing.  That being said, my children always thought that what they needed or wanted to talk to me about was more important than what their brother or sister could possibly have wanted to talk about (gratefully they have grown out of that illusion).  Even though it got better when they became adults, we’re still a noisy group.  Often it was very stressful in trying to handle the needs of so many people and some serious problems but I learned a technique that helped me in those situations and in other hard to handle things.  I would stop and ask myself in the midst of the problem if I was doing the best I could.  If the answer was yes then somehow just stopping to take the mental check helped me to de-escalate and I was able to handle the situation much more calmly.  If the answer was no, and I always knew instantly if I was doing the best I could, then I would take a deep breath and think about what I could do differently to regroup and then go forward, and the amazing thing is this only took a few seconds to do.  Sometimes I needed to apologize and sometimes I needed to get rid of the extraneous distractions to focus better on the problem. Sometimes there was no immediate solution but I was able to handle it better because of my little stop/check technique.

Children

Love

posted on : November 10, 2017 posted by : Somethingsihavelearned 4 Comments

When I was pregnant with my second daughter I wondered how I could ever love another child as much as I loved my first.  After she was born I quickly found out that my ability to love increased and it wasn’t an issue.  When I was pregnant with my third child I wondered how I could ever love a boy as much as I loved my girls, and of course he was born and I found out that I was worried for nothing.  I loved him just as much as my girls.  After that I quit worrying about it and never wondered again if I had the capacity to love another child coming into our home and lives.  In thinking about it I realized that love is like a lit candle that when I light another candle the first candle is not diminished at all in it’s flame and ability to give light, and the second candle’s flame is just as strong.  No matter how many candles I light the original and subsequent flames are not diminished and together the candles create even more light.