Parenting Is Tough Business

The hardest part of parenting for me is letting go. Letting my kids travel a path I know has an easier route is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been a parent for 11 years to one, 8 years to another, and 5 to the youngest. All three are their own unique brand of “Bryan” and I’ve learned that there is no one formula for loving each of them. Children are miraculous and frustrating every moment of their lives. Until I became a parent I didn’t know true love, I didn’t know true frustration, true anger, true admiration, true wonder, true shame-I didn’t know the true feeling of desperation and fear. Nothing prepares you to be a parent-to experience such deep and raw emotion.

Learning to let go is a daily challenge for me but it is a challenge that I have realized I must purposely practice each day. I find it difficult to observe the “helicopter parenting” that seems to pervade our culture and while I feel confident in many of the choices we’ve made for our kids, I still have to remind myself to stand back and allow them the freedom to make their own choices and to experience the consequences of those choices, good or bad.

One of the areas of greatest tension with our kidlets is their instrument practice. In our house, my husband and I have decided that music is an important part of our children’s overall education and they would each take lessons on an instrument of their choice. Those of you who know me well know that I studied violin from a young age and have both bachelor and master’s degrees in music. I no longer play or teach professionally but I feel very strongly that music and music education are an important part of the greater academic picture for our children. In fact, while we require they play an instrument, I secretly hope that none of them is seduced into the profession because it is an incredibly challenging life, one that was not ultimately for me. They fight practice, as most children do, but each time they perform or have a good lesson the pride and confidence in their smiles reassures me that this is important and will be with them for a lifetime.

In any case, here we are, over a week into summer break and the boys are actually quite independent in practicing their violins every morning, then checking in to show me what they worked on before heading off to enjoy freedom. Since pulling myself out of the daily practice sessions they have actually done very well on their own. Proof in my argument that children gain more self confidence and a sense of responsibility when they are actually handed the responsibility and held accountable for the things we ask them to do.

On the other hand, my 5 year old is still dependent on me to help her practice piano.  Oh, how painful it is for a parent to watch their child so agreeable and brilliant in front of their teacher, only to pull out the drama during practice sessions at home. She turns into a silly child that refuses to focus and doesn’t even seem to try. The tears and drama from this child could be award winning!

Three years ago they all loved the violin.

… I’ve gone through this phase with 3 kidlets now. Friends will tell me how jealous they are that I am able to practice and help my kids with their musical instruments but honestly, I think my kids would be happier if I didn’t know anything about what they were doing. From the time they started I search for the best teachers, the teachers that engage me as part of the process and enable me to help them practice at home…..my kids are able to practice more efficiently because they don’t pick up bad habits, and I know all of the best practice techniques to get ‘er done. They hate it though-they have all fought me and I know that it is common but as soon as my oldest was given direction from his teacher to practice on his own, without me,  he began to progress more quickly, take pride, and most importantly gain confidence. H (8 year-old) and I now have an agreement that I’ll only practice with him every other day and this has worked very well for us. Maybe Kat would do better to practice on her own some? She and I will have two weeks on our own this summer and I’m hoping that we can get into a routine without the distraction of our usual daily chaos…..

I’m sure every parent has an area of experience they think they might be able to influence, prepare, or protect their child from. The reality is that human nature forces us to operate from a place of experience and no matter how hard we try we cannot instill true experience in our children – we can do our best to share our experience but until they experience and organically grow through and get to where it is we want them to be, we will have to let them take their own path. That path is a little bit longer than the one we may feel they need to take and sitting back and sitting on my hands, smiling and watching this is the hardest part of parenting for me.

Do you have an area of experience that you feel benefits your kids? How do you work with them to share that experience?

Parenting Is Tough Business

The hardest part of parenting for me is letting go. Letting my kids travel a path I know has an easier route is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been a parent for 11 years to one, 8 years to another, and 5 to the youngest. All three are their own unique brand of “Bryan” and I’ve learned that there is no one formula for loving each of them. Children are miraculous and frustrating every moment of their lives. Until I became a parent I didn’t know true love, I didn’t know true frustration, true anger, true admiration, true wonder, true shame-I didn’t know the true feeling of desperation and fear. Nothing prepares you to be a parent-to experience such deep and raw emotion.

Learning to let go is a daily challenge for me but it is a challenge that I have realized I must purposely practice each day. I find it difficult to observe the “helicopter parenting” that seems to pervade our culture and while I feel confident in many of the choices we’ve made for our kids, I still have to remind myself to stand back and allow them the freedom to make their own choices and to experience the consequences of those choices, good or bad.

One of the areas of greatest tension with our kidlets is their instrument practice. In our house, my husband and I have decided that music is an important part of our children’s overall education and they would each take lessons on an instrument of their choice. Those of you who know me well know that I studied violin from a young age and have both bachelor and master’s degrees in music. I no longer play or teach professionally but I feel very strongly that music and music education are an important part of the greater academic picture for our children. In fact, while we require they play an instrument, I secretly hope that none of them is seduced into the profession because it is an incredibly challenging life, one that was not ultimately for me. They fight practice, as most children do, but each time they perform or have a good lesson the pride and confidence in their smiles reassures me that this is important and will be with them for a lifetime.

In any case, here we are, over a week into summer break and the boys are actually quite independent in practicing their violins every morning, then checking in to show me what they worked on before heading off to enjoy freedom. Since pulling myself out of the daily practice sessions they have actually done very well on their own. Proof in my argument that children gain more self confidence and a sense of responsibility when they are actually handed the responsibility and held accountable for the things we ask them to do.

On the other hand, my 5 year old is still dependent on me to help her practice piano.  Oh, how painful it is for a parent to watch their child so agreeable and brilliant in front of their teacher, only to pull out the drama during practice sessions at home. She turns into a silly child that refuses to focus and doesn’t even seem to try. The tears and drama from this child could be award winning!

Three years ago they all loved the violin.

… I’ve gone through this phase with 3 kidlets now. Friends will tell me how jealous they are that I am able to practice and help my kids with their musical instruments but honestly, I think my kids would be happier if I didn’t know anything about what they were doing. From the time they started I search for the best teachers, the teachers that engage me as part of the process and enable me to help them practice at home…..my kids are able to practice more efficiently because they don’t pick up bad habits, and I know all of the best practice techniques to get ‘er done. They hate it though-they have all fought me and I know that it is common but as soon as my oldest was given direction from his teacher to practice on his own, without me,  he began to progress more quickly, take pride, and most importantly gain confidence. H (8 year-old) and I now have an agreement that I’ll only practice with him every other day and this has worked very well for us. Maybe Kat would do better to practice on her own some? She and I will have two weeks on our own this summer and I’m hoping that we can get into a routine without the distraction of our usual daily chaos…..

I’m sure every parent has an area of experience they think they might be able to influence, prepare, or protect their child from. The reality is that human nature forces us to operate from a place of experience and no matter how hard we try we cannot instill true experience in our children – we can do our best to share our experience but until they experience and organically grow through and get to where it is we want them to be, we will have to let them take their own path. That path is a little bit longer than the one we may feel they need to take and sitting back and sitting on my hands, smiling and watching this is the hardest part of parenting for me.

Do you have an area of experience that you feel benefits your kids? How do you work with them to share that experience?

Proposal For Improving The Blonde Family’s Timeliness

If marriage is a partnership, does that make family a “business”? 

If I were to be reviewed by an independent party (not by my partner because he knows better) in my “business” right now, I think they’d recommend that I be fired. There are many many reasons I could be fired, but let’s just take timeliness under consideration today.

We are late everywhere. We are becoming that LATE family.  I know I’m not alone, but I am not willing to continue in this direction.  It makes our family look inconsiderate and it makes me look bad.  And I’m not bad, I’m just temporarily (for about the next 15 years) discombobulated.

A Discussion About Bowel Movements

I’ve been blogging for about three and a half months now and I really haven’t talked about poop yet, other than the poopy toilet water that was flooding my laundry room a few months back. I was thinking earlier today that, as a pseudo “mommyblogger”, I should probably get my feet wet soon, so to speak. I really want to talk about boobs but my hubby isn’t there yet. I figure if I can embarrass him in a hundred other ways he’ll be numb to the pain and I’ll be talking boobs by my six month bloggoversary, and perhaps be able to mention the “V” word by the time I’m nine months in.

A Letter To Our Prospective Neighbors

I live in an older neighborhood where they are scraping many of the homes in order to build newer ones. My block is in transition and we have yet to have a family with children move in. The house next door to us has just been completed and my children are desperately seeking neighbors of the kidlette kind. Each time someone comes to look at the house they look out the window trying to determine whether the buyers have children. Truth be told, I also look out the window and size them up. Do they have kids? Preferably between the ages of 3 and 10 or better yet of the babysitting age?

In the spirit of informative neighboring I thought I’d compose a letter to prospective home buyers so that they might better understand what they would be getting into by purchasing a home next door to us.

Dear Prospective Home Buyers,
Welcome to our fantastic family neighborhood. If you have children this is the perfect place for you and you will undoubtedly be forever thankful to have us as neighbors. If you don’t have children I’m not sure this is the place for you. We will love you, but you may not love us.

We have three children and, while they are adorable they do make a little bit of noise. You may notice that your bedroom window overlooks our backyard where our detached garage is located just off the alley. (This is the city after all). On the weekdays you may hear me screaming “get in the car”, “we are late”, “get off the swing”, “get in the car”, “GET IN THE FREAKIN’ CAR”, about fifty times, but school starts at 8 and so this process rarely takes more than 5 minutes.

Every Saturday and Sunday at 7am you can expect the repetitive sounds of our sons practicing basketball (again the detached garage is turned sideways so we have a driveway/sport court thing that your kids will love.) I apologize in advance if a ball ends up on your roof or a frisbee through your open window. Don’t mind the screaming three year old, she just likes to get her brothers’ attention and will pitch a fit until she gets her way. Both boys do tend to beat on each other but unless there is blood or broken bones involved, please do not call 911.

As for my darling husband and I, we are fun loving people. If you are a mom you will adore the Happy Hour Playdates that I often host with moms from other blocks. These gatherings can often get a bit loud but we have a fence and as long as they are all contained us moms are happy to let them enjoy one another. When the dads get home from work our Happy Hour often leads into Dinner Hour. This is so much fun …. if you have kids, that is.

You will LOVE being my neighbor. I will always run out of eggs or sugar, etc. and you’ll be able to get to know me really well when I ask to borrow some! I grow tomatoes in the summer and will be dropping them on your front porch by the bucketful. I promise not to let my dog poop in your yard and I’ll pick up your mail when you go on vacation. How fun will all this be?!! … if you have kids, that is.

Summer is coming and we have a really cool backyard, if you have kids you will definitely want to be moved in by then. I hope that this letter will prove to be helpful in your decision to buy this house.. if you have kids, that is.

Sincerely,
Bantering Blonde

Guest Blogger Jack ~ Becoming A Grandparent Part IV

PART IV: Babies on Parade, the Conclusion
(Preface: Our oldest son and his lovely wife had their first child, our first grandchild, on Christmas Eve. As I anticipated a new career as a grandfather, my past experiences with The Babies of Others came to mind.)

A few years after that stupid baby peed on me (please see Part III, here, for details), I saw a baby in a mall. This baby was bald, which is another thing that babies can be and it raises no red flags. However, think about the various ways a human can be bald. This baby was not baby bald, it was bald in a balding-middle-aged-man way. A band of light brown hair was clamped on its head in a ring from ear to ear. The top of its head was dome smooth. Draw a little mustache on that kid and you’d have a tiny 45-year old businessman. Or woman. There was no determining the gender of this specimen without peeking in its diaper, which I declined to do seeing as the infant and I had not been formally introduced. The baby had a serious look on its face, too, as if it was mulling over an upcoming meeting or considering an adjustment to its investment portfolio.

Another time I saw a fat baby. Not cherubic. Fat. A vast little thing. Globe shaped, approaching the diameter of one of those exercise balls it should be working with as soon as possible. The mother was also of colossal proportions and I postulated that the father was probably equally mountainous. But, come on, genes only gave the kid a kick start to obesity. How could it pack away the chow at such a prodigious rate to balloon up that quickly? And what was its potential growth estimate if it managed to add that much tonnage at such an early age? There’s baby fat, sure. I knew what baby fat was. This baby possessed babies’ fats.

Back to the Peeing Baby. During my urine shower I made one comment I thought was clever and timely, but it wasn’t well received by the other adults in the room. I said that I could pee my own pants at that moment and no one would be the wiser. A couple of half smiles, but not a chuckle. It wasn’t like I was offending the baby, for crying out loud. I thought of saying to the Peeing Baby, “Do that again two years from now and there will be consequences.” But, based on the audience’s response to my earlier remark, I decided to leave it at giving the Peeing Baby my fiercest stink eye.

I have seen many instances of people treating their babies like pets or miniature adults and treating their pets like children or miniature adults. Neither case seems well-advised. Tiny babies, months and months from learning to walk, wearing wing tips or running shoes (probably with specially molded orthotics). A poodle wearing a prep school blazer and khaki slacks. A week old infant sporting a bikini and sunglasses. (The bikini bottoms were hilarious, having to be large enough to house a diaper.) A kitten in an argyle turtleneck sweater. (The kitten was clearly not pleased to be wearing the sweater – either the turtleneck was too confining or the design was too loud.) A toddler on a leash. A toddler human, mind you. In general, I don’t get it and I don’t like it and I don’t want my grandchild or the cats in his home to be dealt with in like fashion.

In my grad school days I was sitting in my advisor’s house with a few of my colleagues, enjoying snacks and beverages and casual conversation. Somehow the discussion swayed to stories about ugly babies. One person said she didn’t know what to say to the parents of an ugly baby. Our advisor, a wonderful person and an excellent professor, offered sage advice, “Simply say, ‘Now that’s a baby!’”

We practice saying, “Now that’s a baby!”, in her living room. Our advisor encouraged us to be more enthusiastic, placing emphasis on “that’s” and “baby”. We tried again. It felt good. It felt right. Passersby must have been mystified at the doings inside my advisor’s house, several voices hollering repeatedly, “Now that”s a baby!”

And when, a few years later I faced my very first ugly baby (please see Part I, here), I completely forgot this safe and useful line from my grad school advisor and went with a floppy comment about the massive pile of blankets in the crib.

A pair of frightfully ugly (some would have said beastly) twins scared the bejesus out of me one time in a KMart. I was shopping for essential consumer goods and my travels through the aisles eventually led me to the Photo Center. A positively glowing new mother and father were poised behind one of those monstrous double strollers built for dealing with twins – or one gargantuan baby like the one I mentioned earlier. I was looking at the coffee makers when the family was invited into the Photo Center for their portrait session. The father hoisted Twin #1 out of the super stroller and I got a glimpse of a grotesque, malformed, wild-eyed creature with a few tufts of scraggly hair on its misshapen head that looked like the remains of a rampaging bout of mange. The infant’s eyes and ears were out of alignment, like a poorly done Escher/Dali/Picasso painting. Moments after erasing the image from my mind, the mother picked up Twin #2. As far as I could see, which was a great deal more than I desired, this wriggling object was in every way identical to Twin #1. Incredibly, the parents were perfectly presentable. They were solid, average humans that no one would term ugly or homely or even plain. Perhaps the photographer could position the lighting, I hypothesized, to show off any feature that would help these two ugly babies in some small way.

In retrospect, I could have described my encounters with babies a shade more succinctly, something like this: “Babies are ugly, wailing, urinating, obese, and bald. I know because I’ve seen ‘em.” I guess you’d call that the poet’s approach – use a few carefully chosen words to pack a big punch. Whereas my approach seems to be the Dickensian paid-by-the-word method of using a multitude of words to pack a glancing blow. But, you know, what the heck. It’s a blog. Scroll down, fast as you like.

And how did our first grandchild, a boy, turn out? Well, he’s the cutest and most adorable little human imaginable. Babies are not called Bundles of Joy for nothing.
cheers,
Jack

Terrible Threes

Yesterday was awesomely bad. Wicked bad as they say on the east coast. Yesterday was one of those bloggable, “oh my god, I’m so blogging this” days. Sadly, today hasn’t been much better.

The person who coined the term “terrible two’s” obviously never had a three year old and definitely didn’t have one like K. With my boys I definitely felt three was more of a challenge, but with the girl? Terrible has gained more meaning from the day she turned three.

I’m saying this with love, with total adoration for my beautiful baby. She is smart and really is quite sweet at times. She has always been a bit more hard headed than my boys ever were, but lately the screaming has gotten out of hand. I am not joking when I say that my hearing may actually be damaged by the shrill screams.

She loves to hate me. Trust me, she tells me in between the “you’re my best momma” declarations, that she hates me and that I’m a meanie stupid head – although lately I haven’t even gotten the meanie stupid head starter because she has just launched right into rotten-ness and then I’m in the middle of the grocery store hearing “waffles, not two packs, one.” “one waffle” “one waffle” “one waffle”

“ONE WAFFLE” “You aren’t listening, onewaffleonewaffleonewafflewafflewaffle”

OMG I just need eggs, bread, milk, cereal, fruit, eveyrthing that we don’t have because I’ve been afraid to come to the store with you for a week and a half now. I want to leave the store so badly but we will all starve if I do!

I feel like I could cry. She is the youngest of three and yet I feel like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. She doesn’t ever accept that she isn’t going to get her way until she has pulled out all the stops. I am almost certain that my neighbors think there is something awful going on at our house. It has been in the 70′s and the windows are wide open. The shrill screaming and incoherent yelling that comes out of this child’s mouth is embarrassing.

I’m not a horrible mom. I don’t over or under indulge and I spend plenty of time with her. (Although, I did have to lock myself in the bathroom this morning to complete my Boden order without slamming my head through the screen.) That said, there MUST be something I am doing wrong, or something I’m not doing right.

Help me, please give me advice on things I can try. I’m totally open to your input!!!

The Cost of a Girl’s Day Out

This is me and my Sista (as in sorority sister – Gamma Phi Beta – Vanderbilt) Leslie.  Leslie lives not too far from me, but we don’t get to hang all that often so we ditched the families this weekend and headed to Beaver Creek for a day of kid-free skiing.

I’m thinking $30 sounds good.  So….

My Sweet Valentine Baby

Today, February 14th, is Valentine’s Day.  It also happens to be a very special day for my middle child, Henry.  It is very appropriate that he was born on this day that we all celebrate love and affection.  Of all my children, he is the most outwardly affectionate.  On this day I have prepared a photo essay in honor of my  sweet Valentine Baby.

Happy 6th Birthday Lego boy!

Six years ago today we welcomed you into our family.  Your big brother was so proud.

William wanted to hold and cuddle you all of the time.

Such a happy baby, smiling all the time!

You loved to play on the floor with your toys.

You laughed as much then as you do now!

Always a good eater!

Your first day of preschool… such a big boy!

Your turn to be the big brother! Welcome to baby K!

We spent lots of time at the playground.

This is you at Great Grandma’s house on her 95th birthday. You are riding on the same toy your Dad played on when he was your age!!

Adorable at all times…

You and Daddy at your 5th birthday party last year.

Best dressed kid on the beach.

Those eyes! That smile!

Pre-K Graduation Day

You’ve loved the water all of your life.

Family of Fish!

You begged me to teach you violin starting when you were 3 years old. Now you are a super star!

You have hiked many, many mountains in your lifetime. This is the summit at Loveland Pass, CO.

Your first day of Kindergarten. Bye Bye Baby, Hello Big Boy!

Dear, sweet, lovable smiley boy!  Happy Birthday to you.  Henry, full of life and joy, share your smile, share your happy heart.  You will always be my “H”.