This is the third year that I have been writing my blog. I just had the 4th six month volume printed and delivered last month. The kids like to look at them and I feel like one of my goals for having a blog has come to fruition. I have started a family journal that is documenting our family and helping us remember the fun, mundane, silly, happy, great and not so great memories of our lives while we have these years all living together that might seem like the permanent normal but before we know it will be history.
This being the third Winter I have blogged I have also started to notice some patterns that seem to happen in our family each year. We all seem to get some illness to varying degrees at the end of January beginning of February. It started last this past week for us. Allison got it first, then Matthew, Ryan and I have a very mild version that is hardly noticeable, and Emilee is now taking her turn. It was Matthew’s turn to get it the worst. Since he has asthma it is often his turn. Allison took the longest to recover, but all in all it wasn’t a bad year for sickness. I know a lot of other people that have had it pretty bad. I am jinxing myself and knock on wood we don’t have a round two but I am counting it as a blessing and hoping to keep my streak going of, “No cleaning up puke in 2020!”
Another annual event in February is the pre-Spring Break in preparation for the actual Spring Break next month. I don’t actually count because I really don’t want to know, but between the already short month, teacher conferences, snow days, and holidays if the number of school days isn’t less than the number of days off, it certainly feels like it. I didn’t even count sick days in that either. They had a half day Wednesday and now don’t go back to school until Tuesday.
So far we have been keeping busy. We ate lunch with dad yesterday. Then they all invited a friend or two over.
Emilee had Jovee over so that was business as usual. They played great together and watched Frozen II and went to bed without any issues.
Allison invited a friend over and they played, made slime, and entertained Peanut but I told her she could have a sleepover a different night. She asked Leah to spend the night tonight.
Matthew had two friends over. One had spent the night before but the other hadn’t. Two boys is a lot different than three and boys are a lot different than girls. Me being a girl, I always feel a little more…out of my wheel house with boys. I usually have Ryan check on them most of the time. I always monitor them and screen any movies they watch and collect all electronics/phones at bed time and tell them when it is time to go to bed. I feel like I am pretty good at thwarting possible problems. When the new friends mom dropped him off she talked with me a lot about electronics and sugar. She wanted to know my policies on both. Like I said I watch them but I felt like she wanted a written contract spelled out. After the conversation she had me a little stressed out. Then as she was headed out the door she “warned” me that she had found one of them awake at 4 in the morning when she had the two (not Matthew her son and the other boy) stay at her house one night. I thought, “How often was she checking on them to know they were awake at 4am) I felt like she wanted me to be sitting with them at all times during waking hours and at least hourly during sleep hours. Then I started worrying if it was because she was worried about her son doing something, my son doing something, or just general worry. So I was paranoid and got a crappy night sleep on the couch upstairs because I thought there was going to be some catastrophic event at any moment. They were fine and other than making the basement look like pigs had lived in it for the last year (which I made them clean up), they went to bed when I told them slept until I woke them up at 9:30 for breakfast while rubbing the kink in my neck. Uggg.
Sleepovers are not my favorite but with cousins around they love to have them and it is nice that they can. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite saying they could only have sleep overs with their cousins and no one else so while I don’t suggest them myself, I let them have them on occasion.
I am going to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole here, then get back on track with my original thought process. After worrying and having a crappy nights sleep last night I started evaluating myself a bit. I’m not mad or annoyed at the mom for asking about how I do things with electronics. I am glad that other mom’s are concerned and watch out for things like with kids. And good for her for straight out asking. Most of the time I am not that brave. The more eyes the better. I am mostly annoyed that it made me question myself. I do that a lot. I can get stressed and confused trying to guess what other peoples expectations are and live up to them instead of being confident in my own decisions and expectations. It is something that I am consciously trying to work on. It seems to me like some people are really good at thinking through what they think and feel about things and forming an opinion ahead of time before a situation arrives. I remember in church they told us that a lot when I was growing up. Decide what you are going to do in a situation ahead of time so when the time comes you aren’t put on the spot and you have already made the decision. I think that is good advice and I tried to do that with bigger obvious decisions that might come up in my life. I don’t know if I am just not as creative as some people but this is not a natural thing for me to do. A lot of people I talk with seem to be very good at this. Some people do this with EVERYTHING and that actually annoys me and I think it is exhausting and if it isn’t true it at least appears that they are impossible to please if others don’t know or agree with their opinion. I guess I should say with inconsequential things this annoys me like ‘how to empty the dishwasher’, ‘how to correctly replace a toilet paper roll’. That stuff is inconsequential and it seems trivial to me to think about how I like every single thing to be in my life. Yes, we can have preferences, that’s different. The bigger, more important things I tend to find myself having a general thought about something but until I actually do it myself or am confronted with something myself I generally don’t form a solid response or opinion. Another way to look at it is I guess I am not the best on the spot thinker. I do better at either being able to take a step back and take time to think, or if that isn’t possible afterwards evaluating how it went and then if that situation happens again I have a much better handle on what I want to do. But sometimes in life- a lot of times in life we have to react on the spot. When this happens to me instead of trusting myself, I often find myself trying to guess what the other person is wanting me to say or do and then my people pleaser self tries to please them. It is easy to see how this can get stressful pretty fast, as I can not read minds. My point to this tangent is that I am trying to make a more conscious decision to remind myself when those new situations come up-like a mom asking what my electronic/sugar policy is-that I can and should trust myself to just say what I do then taking her feedback, instead of trying to guess exactly what she wants me to say and then hovering over the boys like a weirdo all night. I am biased but I have a pretty good head on my shoulders. The longer you live the more experiences you have and there is a lot to be said for life experience. Which brings me to another point. Pay attention and read this next part closely my children. This isn’t anything you haven’t heard before. Your dad and I tell you and try to help each one of you on a daily basis with our own life experiences. You will be very familiar with what I am going to say…something in the language of- “The reason we are having this conversation is because we are trying to share what we have learned with you because”… we have ALREADY done it or something similar to it most of the time. And if we haven’t, all the other experiences we HAVE had will help you more than all the experiences you HAVEN’T had yet. The older I get the more I appreciate life experience, mine and others. One of my favorite quotes right now is, from Socrates. He is getting the credit if it wasn’t him. It sums up a lot of what I have been rambling on about.
Smart people learn from everything and everyone. Average people from their experiences. Stupid people already have the answers. ~Socrates
I have been all three of these. Most of the time I’d like to think I am an ‘average smart person’ but I hope I’m at least leaning more and more towards a ‘smart person’ every day.
That rabbit hole was longer than I thought. Where was I…After our sleepovers everyone went home then I picked up the rest of the cousins (we already had Jovee) and went to the community center and swam until they were all exhausted. Then they paired up and split out among each others houses to spend the rest of the afternoon playing. So we have had a successful two days of pre-Spring Break so far, and a fun low key Valentine’s Day. Three more days to go!
Tomorrow Grandma and Grandpa Terry are coming to stay for a few days. I will wait to blog about that until it happens. 😁