Best Mom Tip #186: Beeeeeee......Patient

Be patient. NOW! NOW! DO IT NOW!

Hee hee. Just kidding.

Patience may be a virtue, but it is not one that comes easily to most of us. Anyone who has ever watched a preschooler insist upon putting on their own shoes while the minutes ticked by and you crept ever closer to that point where you would be so late people would comment on how they "didn't know if you were still coming" knows the pain of patience. 

Or if you've ever changed a diaper and dressed a bunch of kids only to go to load them all in the car and discover that, somehow, the baby needs changing AGAIN. Or if you've sat in a doctor's office waiting room trying to keep the baby from licking the floor while you waited for the strep test you already KNOW is positive. 

Or, sometimes, when you're asked yet another question about the color of the sky, or how power lines work, or about the criminal justice system. OK, that one may just be me since my son is very interested in police work and what happens to bad guys. Today he asked if there were beds in jail and when I said yes he wanted to know why the bad guys didn't just sleep on the floor as punishment. Trying to explain to a Kindergartner that people go to jail as punishment and not for punishment is more challenging than I would have thought.

Most of us don't want to squish our kids' inquisitive minds or stomp on their independence when they learn new tasks. And the doctor's office isn't trying to make my life difficult by actually determining what diseases my kids have. I know all this in my mind, but what about in the actual life moments? The moments when we HAVE to leave the house RIGHT NOW or we have to wait because your brother needs antibiotics or I cannot hold you because everyone else has to eat and CAN'T YOU SEE I HAVE SOMETHING HOT IN MY HANDS?

How can we be patient in those times when it is the last thing in the world we want to be? 

I volunteer with the high school ministry at our church and I joke that working with teenagers is a long game. You never know what moments may matter to them or what words might seep into their hearts and resonate later on in their lives. That was true when I taught high school as well. You hope that they feel loved and valued and that maybe they learn something that will make them better adults and better citizens and better human beings in general. Sometimes they look you up to tell you thanks or that you made a difference, but mostly you just scatter your seeds and hope something grows at some point. 

Parenting is an even longer game. A lifetime, at least, but perhaps even longer. What I teach my children about love, respect, discipline, encouragement, commitment, and faith will echo through the generations that come after me. My daughter will emulate me in ways that neither she nor I can foresee. My sons will respect in their wives some of the same qualities they respect in me. I have no other tasks in this life that compare to the joyful burden of raising my children.

So why in the world am I so annoyed at them for being slow or grumpy or intentionally deaf to my instructions?

In church this morning our preacher talked about how, nearly 2000 years before Jesus was born, God promised Abraham that "all peoples on earth" would be blessed through him (Genesis 12:3). Today, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their heritage back to Abraham. People groups that don't follow those faiths come into contact with those who do. God still moves through wheels he set turning millennia ago. God's plan, His master plan to bring joy, hope, and light to the weary world, has been thousands of years in the making. Even when mankind does his very utmost to screw up the whole thing and blame it on God in the process, God's purpose and plan moves forward.

THAT is patience.

It occurred to me that if I could gain even a tiny fraction of God's perspective on others, my patience might expand exponentially. In that light, I have noticed a few things about my interactions with my children.

1. My children are NOT trying to push my buttons. Usually. Sometimes they are, but mostly they are just learning to navigate this world.

2. My ability to be on time, have everyone dressed well, or make dinner will not be the most important thing(s) they remember about me. My attitudes toward them will always have more value and more impact.

3. My children have very little control over their own lives and sometimes they are trying to claim independence in some small, seemingly insignificant way that matters deeply to them in that moment. 

Practically, this attempt at patience manifests itself in a few ways. I try to create "work-arounds" for their known triggers. The kid who MUST put on his own shoes or he will melt down is told to do so 15 minutes early, for instance. When I have no control over how long something is going to take (prescriptions, traffic, etc.) I take a deep breath and let it go. My poor attitude will not make us move faster. Children who refuse to listen are occasionally picked up and moved against their will, but without the arguing or threats or stress build-up beforehand. 

I try to focus on the long game, not just this task or this day. Sometimes I fail. 

Alright, relatively often I fail. And that's when I pray. For patience, for perspective, and most of all, for the long game. 

Best Mom Tip #185: Look Down

After having written a somewhat downer of a Christmas post last week, I thought I'd make up for it with cute pictures of my toddler. SO...This is Baby Jack.

  

He is cute and cuddly and he really likes to help do things like put on his shoes and socks and decorate the Christmas tree. He is terrible at all of these things.
He also likes to throw the Christmas ornaments, eat the tinsel off of the tree, and steal things and hide them in the cabinet of toys for later. He is significantly better at these tasks.

For the most part, he makes my life a lot more difficult. He screams when I buckle him into the car seat, he tried to steal a stranger's snack at church this morning, and he flings himself on the ground when he doesn't get his way (say, when I remove a stranger's snack from his grubby fingers). But he also forces me to look at the world with different, and far more passionate, eyes.

If your Christmas holidays are anything like mine, they involve a ridiculous amount of shuffling and logistics and can seem kind of overwhelming. Figuring out what I'm supposed to send in for class parties, which room parent is supposed to get the money for the teacher gift, and which kid is going to which party feels like one of those logic problems I used to do in school.

You know, like, five girls are named Becky, Kaitlyn, Dylan, Brittany, and Heather. Their favorite colors are red, blue, pink, purple, and green. They each play one instrument, the violin, cello, harmonica, piano, and tuba. Becky hates pink and plays the tuba. No girl plays a stringed instrument and likes a traditionally feminine color. What day does Kaitlyn go to the orthodontist? Or something like that.

Having little people who are thrilled with it all, however, has made me try to slow down and really enjoy the chaos and clutter. On Thanksgiving we went to a local tree lighting and our 5-year-old said, "Mommy, Thanksgiving had a little visitor and it was Christmas!"

How cute is that? So I've been trying to welcome our little visitor of lights and cookie exchanges and gingerbread parties and sing-alongs and handmade ornaments and gift buying/wrapping/re-wrapping (Harry crushed three of them while climbing behind the Christmas tree to steal his brother's ornament) without getting frustrated. It doesn't always work.

Which brings me back to Jack. On top of the kitchen table.

This is my precious 1-year-old climbing up on our table in order to play with the Fisher Price Little People Nativity set. He picks up the donkey and barks. He picks up the camel and growls. He is also not very good at identifying animal sounds. He has monkey, though, so that should come in handy here in Atlanta.

The third time I found Jack on top of the table stealing wise men and risking the health of his already bonk-prone skull, I had an epiphany.

"Why in the world don't I move this thing to somewhere lower?"

I've started to try to look at our wonderfully tacky Christmas decorations with my children's eyes, from a point about two feet off the ground. After seeing our house decorated for the first time this year our teenage baby-sitter said, "I like it. It's whimsical and magical. I bet the kids love it." And she's right. They do love it.

They love seeing everyone they know (except Aunt Julie and family--Hi, Aunt Julie!) throughout the month.
They love that I bake things (really, the only time of the year I do that).
They love class parties.
They love giving their teachers gifts (even though I know from my own teaching experience that cash would be better.)
They love to decorate the front porch.
They love to sing Christmas carols.
They love to celebrate.

So keeping in mind my little ones and their enjoyment of the holidays (and also Jack's health) I moved the nativity.


Underneath the hideous reindeer candy dish, underneath the garishly colored ornaments, right where it can be reached by little fingers. There is a wise man missing. There is a race car, and sometimes a dinosaur, present. The camel can often be found lying pitifully on its side in the middle of the hallway.

Isn't it beautiful?