No Average Mom

We have started to notice a pattern in our oldest son where he wants to eat when he is bored. I recognize that growing children need nutrition but I seriously don’t want him battling food the rest of his life. In order to differentiate if he is really hungry or just bored we only allow healthy food options when he asks for a snack. My thinking is that a person who is really hungry will choose a healthy option whereas when you are mindlessly munching fruit or yogurt isn’t nearly as appealing.

Because this is my blog I am taking the liberty here and now of bragging about my children whenever I want. In my real life I do not and would not do this but here I am going to. It may happen a great deal so if this is a problem go elsewhere .

My oldest son, 7, is brilliant. So there I finally said it. I will preface that by saying he is also socially immature and has a knack for whining that drives me up the wall. I will preface the second statement by saying he has a heart so big, generous, and selfless that I wouldn’t trade the whining for anything if it meant him being less loving and caring.

To expound a bit on the way his mind works, think about other 7 year old boys you know…Mine gets up every morning and runs downstairs and grabs a book. One morning he read an entire book (Because of Winn Dixie) before we got up. Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers, and Last of the Mohicans are just a few of this month’s reads. As I type, he is reading the Encyclopedia of Science and asking me some tough questions. Having hit the letter A first he now wonders if the term “abortion” applies to the baby we lost during pregnancy a couple of years prior.

His mind is constantly a whirling with big ideas of things to build, create, make, and do. The number of times the child says “can we” in a day becomes mind numbing. I have mindlessly committed my husband and myself to any number of projects without considering what he is asking and then have to back out realizing the project is unattainable. This is bad form for a parent very, very bad form.

So this morning I had the idea of starting a “can we” list. This seems like a good idea on a number of fronts. The first being the child will get a great deal of handwriting practice (his is terrible). Secondly, it gives him a place to put his ideas. If the idea is truly important he is to write it on the list. Periodically (hopefully each week) we will go through the list and talk about the things on it and why they are import to him and whether or not they are feasible. As a parent this will keep me from mindlessly committing to build a robot while cooking dinner.

The first thing to go on the list was:

1. Build Me A Tail.

Why does he was a tail? According to him he could use this to stabilize himself when doing complicated task or just give one of his legs a rest when he has to stand for a long time…

Today I found myself with a few minutes to spare and decided to visit some of my favorite blogs from days gone by. These blogs were very important to me during our struggle with infertility and building our family. Over the years you start to feel this unspoken connection with people who share a similar life experience. As it has been almost a year or more since I have visited a few of these sites I was overjoyed and sadden in some cases to catch up with the lives of these “blog buddies”. A few like myself have since found themselves enjoying the miracle of parenthood while others are still riding the roller coaster of tears that this particular journey throws at you. I thank God everyday for my two beautiful children but even I have days where I would love a vacation alone at the Outer Banks. Visiting these blogs reminds just how fortunate I am to be knee deep in drippy noses, acting out in school, and middle of the night teething tears. On tough parenting days like today this brief moment of catch up was exactly the message this Mom needed. I am so thankful to be standing on this side of that journey !

Two weeks ago my husband and I decided it was time for our 7 year old to begin getting an allowance. He has been learning about money in school and has really grasped the information very quickly. I began to realize that he really needed to get some real life experience with money and an allowance seemed like a great way to provide him with it. I really don’t know (or actually care) what other people consider an appropriate age to begin offering an allowance and think you just know when your child is ready. Furthermore, I don’t really care what other people give their children in terms of an amount. We decided that $2.00 per week seemed reasonable and would be provided under certain conditions. We have a certain standard of behavior that he is expected to maintain in our home and outside of it. This includes behaving in school and completing his work as required. At home he needs to complete tasks when asked and treat us respectfully. I am not a big fan of calling jobs around the house “chores” and prefer to have him understand that as part of a family we are all expected and privileged to be able to contribute to helping the house run smoothly. I believe that instilling a good work ethic is important and that being able to work and be productive is a privilege rather than a “chore”. I want my son to view being active in his home, school, family, and community as something to look positively on and feel good about and try to use positive terminology rather than negative. So far he is incredibly excited about his allowance and even slept with his jar where he is stashing his loot. It is fun to see him putting all the pieces together and begin to understand how our monetary system works. What I believe truly helped was to make sure that before implementing the allowance that he understood that cash or no cash he is expected to behave and contribute to our family and that now the allowance is simply a step forward in his process of maturing.