good mommy

Kidspace_1
why is it that when i take my kids on an outing i feel like a good mommy? like, check, took the kids to the museum, did my good mommy thing for the week! ๐Ÿ™‚ is it because the majority of the week has been spent indoors… doing nothing all that spectacular? and i feel guilty, so i say, ‘boys! what do you want to do today?!’ and being that they are incredible homebodies, they say, nothing. ๐Ÿ™‚ music to my ears, really, because i am a homebody too. but today i got antsy. school starts in exactly 2 weeks. i need to take them out and DO something… make some summer memories! i remember a local kids museum remodeled and we hadn’t been yet. so we go. they are a little hesitant when we get there… but before they know it, they are climbing the ‘ant trees’, examining rocks, seeing scorpions that glow in the dark, making aluminum boats and floating them down the arroyo, rock/wall climbing and riding trikes. (caleb’s favorite part) we are even going back tomorrow because mommy managed to score a free pass for us since one of the exhibits were closed. ๐Ÿ™‚
so anyways, i feel good. i pack my sweaty head boys in the car… knowing we will just go home and watch TV, but it’s all good. they got to do some exploring in a place other than their living room. and i realize… a kid doesn’t need to be packed with things to do 24/7. i don’t need to feel like i have to do things like this everyday to be a good mom. that they are cool just being with me. hanging or what not. those are our summer memories.

8 thoughts on “good mommy

Add yours

  1. looks like a fun time!
    i wanna go!
    you are so the good mom. you shouldn’t even give that notion a second thought!

    Like

  2. What constitutes a good parent? Here’s an interesting take from the blog site of Doug TenNapel.
    “I Spank My Kids
    Monday, August 22 2005
    …waiting for Child Protective Services to show up at my door any minute now. I know all of the shrinky therapy-speak about how spanking makes the kids violent etc. but my kids aren’t violent, and the violent kids I know don’t have parents that spank them.
    I ask a lot of advice from other parents, especially those with older kids so that the parent has more perspective than me. One parent’s daughter just got a DUI in college. I asked him what he could have done different, if anything, to avoid the grief he’s experiencing today. He said, “I wish I was a lot harder on her…which is weird because I was already more strict with her than any of her friend’s parents.”
    This sentiment is reflected in this parenting article from this excellent article from Jewish World Review:
    …Kellye Carter Crocker reported on a Parents survey that showed most mothers expressing “deep concern over today’s discipline methods.” For starters, 88 percent said parents “let children get away with too much.”
    I’m not worried about what my daughter thinks of me…I’m not her peer. Will she be in therapy at 33 talking about how much she hates her father? Probably. Dennis Prager says that your children will grow up and hate no matter what you so you might as well do what’s right.
    One more piece of wisdom I’ll never forget. I hear a lot of criticism for not spending “quality time” with my kids. Maybe I only get thirty minutes of time playing mermaid princess with my daughter or Transformers with my son. I only hold the new baby and look into her beautiful eyes for 15 minutes a day. This is neglect by today’s standards. My 3.5 year old daughter would have me play with her for 8 hours a day if she had her way. I once went to a comedy routine by Everybody Loves Raymond’s Patty Heaton. She said, “I never feel guilty for not playing with my 4 sons because I don’t have ONE memory of my mom getting on the floor and playing with me.”
    That’s funny, because my mom and dad did just fine raising me and they never got down on the floor and played dinosaurs with me. In fact, I’ve been to therapy for years complaining about my parents and never once did I say that the problem was that they didn’t get down on the floor and play with me enough.
    Betsy Hart is the author of It Takes a Parent and she offers this great perspective on keeping kids in perspective:
    I see an epidemic of idolized kids in this country. But one of the many problems with treating children like precious little hothouse flowers, instead of the hearty geraniums they generally are, is that it can sap the joy of family life from everyone. Mom and Dad are left exhausted and overrun. And the little ones, whether or not they become tyrants, may at least come to believe that they are not really free to fail – I mean, they’ve got to stay on that pedestal and be the center of everything, right? That’s pretty sad.
    Finally, I find great parenting advice from a great poet of the past:
    When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too of course, but at least for her it’s a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what’s happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of a plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time. Even if he should decide to abandon it forever ten minutes later, the memory will nag him to the grave. He has seen the creation of the world. It has his mark on it. He has its mark on him. Both marks are, for better or for worse, indelible.
    All sons, like all daughters, are prodigals if they’re smart. Assuming the Old Man doesn’t run out on them first, they will run out on him if they are to survive, and if he’s smart he won’t put up too much of a fuss. A wise father sees all this coming, and maybe that’s why he keeps his distance from the start. He must survive too. Whether they ever find their way home again, none can say for sure, but it’s the risk he must take if they’re ever to find their way at all. In the meantime, the world tends to have a soft spot in its heart for lost children. Lost fathers have to fend for themselves.
    Even as the father lays down the law, he knows that someday his children will break it as they need to break it if ever they’re to find something better than law to replace it. Until and unless that happens, there’s no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose him and find themselves. Terrible blnders will be madeโ€”dissapointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they’ll keep making them even after they’ve found themselves too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on. And every hard knock they ever get, knocks the father even harder still, if that’s possible, and if and when they finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there’s maybe no rejoicing greater than his in all creation.
    – Frederick Buechner,’Whistling in the Dark’

    Like

Leave a reply to Terrie Cancel reply

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑