A Different Perspective on Chores

The other day as she was getting out the vacuum, Goobie said to me, “I bet you’re glad you had kids so we can help you clean, right, Mom?” While it is lovely that my children are old enough to make significant contributions to the household chores, “helping me clean” (shockingly) is not actually at the top of the list of reasons why I had children–let alone why I assign my kids to do chores. So why do I see chores as a valuable necessity for kids? I believe that having regular household chores does the following:

• Teaches life skills.
• Teaches responsibility.
• Contributes to the family’s feeling of team spirit and each individual’s sense of pride in the home.

Why is it that kids are most excited about helping to clean when they’re least competent at it–or when it’s not required of them?

Though I think chores are important, I’ve sometimes struggled with the execution of that principle. When my kids were very small, I made them chore charts: a little slider to move from “To Do” to “Done!” to show that they had remembered to clear their dishes, put their laundry down the chute, and pick up their toys before bed. But after their initial excitement, I found that I was forever having to remind them to do their chores, and often I found it easier to pick up the dirty clothing myself than to get their attention, indicate what needed doing, and endure the whining while they did it. Making sure your kids actually do their chores takes work!

Eventually, those basic chores became second nature, and I felt the kids were ready to learn more ways to contribute to the family, but I again struggled with execution. Should chores happen daily or weekly? Should each child be assigned one set of chores, or should they be allowed to choose from a list? Should chores be done at a certain time, or should the kids have the freedom to choose when to do them? After several false starts, we’ve settled on a system that has now served our family well for several years. While it now needs some expanding so they learn new, more complicated skills, here’s what has worked for us.

baby steps to success for a (very!) picky eater

Dinnertime was torture for me as a kid. While my family termed me “picky”, I considered myself merely to be a keen observer of flavors and textures–with a distinct idea of which ones I liked and didn’t like. I can remember many meals at which my mother griped, “I hope you have a little girl just like you some day!”

Well, she didn’t get her wish. While I do have a little girl, she eats far better than I did. Instead I have a little boy who is a pickier eater than I could ever claim to be.

He didn’t start out that way. He started out loving every big-people food he could get his mouth around. But something started causing him to writhe all night long (and none of the very-expensive specialists could figure out why), and slowly my happy baby turned into a perpetually cranky little guy who began refusing more and more foods. By the time he was three, he ate almost nothing besides peanut butter toast and Life cereal–and he was very particular about how he consumed those.

My pediatrician proposed eliminating peanut butter and Life from our home in order to force him to eat something else, but since my child absolutely flipped his lid if I even placed another food too close to his seat at the table, I knew that this extreme would cause a huge emotional upheaval, and that was not the way I wanted to go. Instead, I’ve blazed a far more gradual route–but it’s brought progress in a far less stressful manner.

In case you might find it helpful, here’s what we’ve done.

I started by assessing where he was at and determining my goal for him. When we began, he ate a very limited number of foods and would not tolerate even the proximity of any non-approved food items. My goal for him was not to be a bold, adventurous eater, but merely to be capable of tasting new foods without a complete meltdown and (ideally) to broaden his palette. Rather than jumping straight to tasting new foods, I worked in baby steps, always telling him what I planned to do before doing it–and giving him at least a one-day warning. Our steps were as follows:

1. Tolerate the proximity of new foods. I determined a “D Day” and began talking it up. (“On Sunday night, I’m going to do something different. At dinnertime I am going to put a tiny bit of one or two dinner foods on your plate along with your toast. You won’t have to eat these foods or even touch or sniff them, and I’ll make sure they’re not touching your toast in any way. You’re getting to be a big boy, though, and I want you to get used to at least looking at new foods so that you don’t get upset when a food you don’t like is near you. If you never get used to new foods, it will be very hard for you to visit other people’s houses and share meals with them, and I think that will be important to you as you grow older.”) After spending two days providing this very specific warning of what I was going to do, when, and why, I began by putting teeny dollops of one or two foods on one side of a plate, far from his toast. Before I brought his food to the table, I gave him a final warning about what he would see. He wasn’t thrilled, but I reminded him that he knew it was coming and it would not effect his eating, so he survived. After a few days, he stopped fussing about the new foods on his plate.

2. Smelling new foods. When looking at new foods became easy, I began talking about our next step. Now, rather than just looking at the foods, he would smell them. Again, I talked about this change before I implemented it, and I gave a specific time when it would begin. At the first meal, I required him to smell one food. I reminded him that he needn’t touch it or taste it, only smell it. Again, I provided the reason I felt this to be important for him to learn. He resisted with some tears, but I calmly insisted and withheld his toast until he allowed me to pass the food within six inches of his nose. Allowing him to choose which food to smell alleviated some of his distress and gave him some control over the situation. This step took longer than the last one, and it was several weeks before he would consistently smell our dinner without falling apart.

3. Touching new foods. Again, after the previous step grew to be easy, I began talking about touching the new foods. I emphasized that I would not require him to taste the food, but that I wanted him to begin getting used to the feel of different foods. Again I set a particular date and time at which this step would begin, and I explained that I would touch a bit of food to his closed mouth. I assured him that he could hold a rag and immediately wipe his mouth. This, again, was a challenging step, and I think the only thing that made it survivable for him was that I allowed him to choose which food to touch to his lips. Frankly, I don’t care what food he gets used to, so long as he is broadening his horizons.

4. Tasting new foods. With the same warnings as before, we moved on to tasting once touching proved tolerable. Initial tastes were a quick tongue poking at a spoon of food and barely getting an atom of flavor, but it was a start. I let him have a drink ready to wash away the flavor and a rag to wipe his tongue if necessary, and again he was allowed to select the food to taste.

4b. This is a bit of an in-between step. After he was comfortable touching his tongue to new foods, I began to require him to take a teeny bit of the food in his mouth. At this stage, he was allowed to spit the food out onto his plate if he wanted to. I felt we needed some bridge between tasting and feeling the food outside of his mouth and tasting and feeling it inside his mouth BEFORE I started requiring him to swallow the food.

5. Eating new foods. Once he could handle tastes, swallowing was next. Initial swallows were minuscule–and I would listen to complaints about size and make the taste smaller if possible. Gradually–oh, so very gradually–I increased the size of his tastes.

Success? Three months after beginning this path, my child’s meals still consist mostly of peanut butter toast and Life cereal. He chooses one food to taste at each family meal, though he generally heads for the vegetables or grain products. Compared to what he was willing and able to tolerate a few months ago, however, I consider our progress a victory.

And there’s more. The other day when I was deciding what to make for dinner, little Pookie piped up with, “I think you should make beans, Mommy. I kind of like those.” And when I triumphantly placed a bowl of beans on the table that night, he pointed to one and said, “I’m going to eat this one–it’s nice and big!” And then, much to my shock, he added, “And maybe I could eat another one, too.” I now have a two-bean Pookie.  Better yet, this very night he declared that the next time we have beans, he’s going to choose three to eat.

turning back time (in a way)

Somehow, I find that I’m often restless.  Perhaps I can blame it on my mom–she was constantly rearranging the furniture of one room or another as I was growing up, so life seemed full of excitement and change.  At any rate, I feel like I have reinvented our homeschooling life in one way or another countless times in the last two school years.

I’ve gone the furniture angle.  We started with one small work table and switched to using individual desks.  I rearranged our work space in the front room two or three times to increase efficiency.  This past winter I even switched our work space to the family room at the back of the house by the kitchen, combining play space with work space and moving our living room furniture to the front room where (ideally) it makes for a more formal, cleaner-looking entry (except when the kids colonize it as their fort-building space).

I’ve gone the curriculum angle.  We’ve switched writing curricula, math curricula, history plans, spelling materials, Spanish tactics…  Frankly, I’ve discovered that I’m a bit of a rebel when it comes to curriculum, and I can’t seem to use anything as-is; I find myself always adjusting techniques or cobbling a few resources together into something that better suits us.  Perhaps I should bill it myself as “confident and adaptive” rather than “unwilling or unable to follow established plans.”

I’ve gone the scheduling angle.  We used to start promptly at 9:30 with a snack and read-aloud.  That time has gradually moved later (and later), since I hate to interrupt productive, happy playtime.  I’ve also adjusted the content of our days, spending a full week on science followed by a full week on social studies, testing out alternating subjects on various days, lengthening or shortening our lessons and work time.

The older they get, the more I find myself prioritizing moments like this, thankful that we have the time to enjoy a gentle rain and to let imaginations run wild.  Perhaps it’s because the older they get, the more I realize that simple things like this won’t always bring them such raw joy, and we’d best make the most of the present moments and the joys they offer.

Last fall I felt like I was simply trying to crowd too much content into our lives.  I was burnt out from trying to plan math and history and writing and grammar and science and Spanish and art and…  You get the idea.  Even with many of those subjects being only once or twice a week, it was a lot of juggling–particularly since for most of it I’m either creating my own curriculum or heavily modifying existing materials (and, like a perpetual first-year teacher, I’m always preparing new material).  I felt like I wasn’t really doing any subject especially well, and worse yet, the kids had lost some of their joy for learning.  There was no way I wanted to quench that spark so early in their educational careers!

After pondering what had made learning together so magical when the kids were younger, I decided that it was mostly because it was instigated by their interest and thus had their complete buy-in.  I realized a few other things as well: first, I tended to get restless and need change every month or two; secondly, if I changed our subjects of study every couple months, we could cover fewer subjects at a time and still rotate through a full complement over the course of a year.

Thus, my six-week block scheduling began in January.  In a way, this is like turning back time, reverting to the priorities I had when they were preschoolers: following their lead and being willing to shift focus as their personal goals shifted.  (It sounds odd to think of preschoolers as having personal goals, but if you watch carefully, they’re always working on some skill–even if they themselves don’t realize it.)

I started by soliciting ideas from the kids of things they’d like to study; near the end of each block, this process is repeated.  If they run stuck on ideas, I make suggestions–which they often tweak.  Sometimes the kids choose separate topics–Liddy wanted to draw and learn about animals while Asher was interested in math and the geography of South America and Australia–but in general, I try to limit us to about four topics and combine as many as we can.

It’s working.  Both the kids and I are still facing each day with excitement over what we’re going to do, even though we’re nearing the end of a semester (or trimester, since I tend to think of summer as its own academic time), when we’d usually be rather blah.  In fact, each evening the kids are eagerly asking what our work will be for the next day!

While I do keep a review rotation going so we don’t completely forget our parts of speech or basic math, most of what we do is kid-driven.  And as soon as we so much as start tiring of what we’re studying, we discover that it’s already time to think about what we want to learn next.  Hooray for excitement and motivation and learning and joy!

thoughts on legacy

Things I Hope My Kids Forget
– The clutter on the kitchen counter and on my bedroom floor
– The times Mommy forgot about dinner until 4 pm and we ended up with some weird combination of items to eat
– The days when Mommy was easily frustrated with them
– The many times they were told, “No, that costs too much money.”
– Mommy’s lack of enthusiasm for playing the same pretend-to-be-fish-hiding-from-sharks game for an hour straight

Things I Hope My Kids Remember

– The fact that Mommy played the same pretend-to-be-fish-hiding-from-sharks game for an hour straight
– The fact that Mommy let them collect worms and keep them in buckets on the kitchen counter, gave them baggies to try to grow all kinds of seeds in the window, and had shallow containers of water ready to accept plucked dandelions and other weedy treasures
– The gazillion-and-one space-themed projects Mommy came up with to feed their fascination with planets
– The sight of Mommy slithering out from under the bed or crawling out from the back of the closet amidst delighted squeals of “WE FOUND YOU!”
– Our walks and bike rides together, inevitably leading us to stop and ponder some unusual plant, help a stray worm, smell some flowers, or throw sticks into the creek
– Snuggling up on the couch together to read books
– Love. Joy. Security. Wonder. Curiosity.

purposeful parenting, part 2: MommyDotEdu

So I’m a goal-oriented mommy.  I think we’ve already established that.  And at the beginning of the summer, I professed that I wanted to be mindful of what I do with my children, ensuring that I help them to develop skills that I think are important and to enjoy a wide range of experiences.  Over the summer, I took some time to ponder what I think is important.  Here’s what I came up with:

• Social Skills: All toddlers and preschoolers are in the process of developing their social skills, learning how to get along with others.  The only way to develop these skills is through practice.  I’m committing myself to finding a minimum of one social activity each week (beyond church) to give my kids a chance to interact with other kids and adults.  I’ve decided that I’ll look for free library programs, arrange playdates, and try to participate in a variety of MOMS Club activities to fulfill this goal.
• Physical Skills: While little ones naturally hone in on activities that help them to develop physically, it certainly can’t hurt for me to provide them with a wide range of opportunities for development, particularly in areas that I note weakness or particular interest.  I’ve made a list of activities that develop either gross- or fine-motor skills, and I plan to pick a skill each week to make a priority for us.
• Faith Formation: For ‘Love and I, our Christian faith is important to us.  We have already committed to going to church each week as a family, reading our children’s Bible daily at dinnertime, and praying before meals and bed, but I wanted to put more thought into nurturing their faith.  To that end, I’m working on ABC Bible verse coloring pages and plan to continue working through the Catechism for Young Children with them so they know what it is we believe.
• Social Awareness: As part of their faith formation, I believe it’s important for my kids to learn to think about others, appreciating the diversity of people in the world, knowing a bit about what’s going on in the world, and recognizing their responsibility to care for others.  While some of this global and social awareness is difficult to communicate to kids little enough that they have no concept of any place other than where they live, I can work on the social responsibility aspect.  Our church collects food for the food pantry on an ongoing basis and provides meals for a local homeless shelter; I already have the kids help bring canned goods to church for the food pantry, and I can have them help me bake brownies to supplement the meals for the homeless shelter.  I have the kids help me shop for school supplies to drop off at the Salvation Army, and I’ve been doing Operation Christmas Child and Project Angel Tree for years; I’d like to get the kids more involved in those, though I realize it will be difficult at their ages for them to understand why we’re giving all the cool new stuff away—I’m not quite sure how I’m going to deal with that, but we’ll see…
• Art and Culture: I want my kids to be exposed to and learn to appreciate the arts and cultural experiences.  I want them to experience live theater (professional and local/school), live music (symphony and local bands in the park), local cultural festivals, and a variety of museums.  Our early bedtime prohibits much of this for now, but I’ll be looking for daytime opportunities this year.  My goal is to try to find one kid-oriented theater production, one kid-friendly museum, and a cultural festival within the next six months, and I think that’s doable.  I also plan to listen to a variety of music, provide a wide range of art supplies, and attempt to cook at least some slim variety of different food types.
• Science and Nature: One of the drawbacks of school is that it’s hard to do hands-on science with large groups of kids.  Schools find it much easier and cheaper to teach from textbooks or have the teacher demonstrate an experiment while the kids watch and take notes.  I want to encourage my kids to appreciate the world around them and to understand how it works (at some level—mostly through experience and exploration at this age).  Since there’s only the three of them I can provide more hands-on experience than a school can, and I want to do so as much as possible.  I’ve made a long list of science-related activities I think would be fun for preschoolers, and I plan to continue to spend lots of time in the backyard and hiking at local nature preserves.
• General Academic Information: This is the part most folks seem to be stressing over lately, but I put it at the bottom of my list on purpose.  While I want my kids to be brilliant and all, I think most of what they need to know at this age they’ll pick up on their own.  If there are certain things I think they ought to know, I’ll work them into our life.  Mostly, I plan to read to them as much as I can, taking a visit to the library every week so they can pick out a few fresh books to keep them excited and interested.  Other than that, I plan to talk to my kids, answering their questions and pointing things out to them.  I plan to sing, make silly rhymes, and recite particularly appropriate/memorable poems we’ve learned from our books and magazines.  I plan to discuss my daily activities and involve my kids in everything from cleaning the house to shopping to making meals.  Basically, I plan to live with my kids.  That’s educational, right?

Mommy’s Goals for this Week, Or MommyDotEdu Fall 2012, Week 1:

• Social: Attend a MOMS Group meeting where the kids can play with other kids and watch Mommy interact.
• Physical: Give the opportunities to work on climbing (gross motor) and writing (fine motor).
• Faith: Review the Bible verses and catechism we began memorizing last fall, before I got too pregnant and tired and lazy.
• Art and Culture: Listen to (and sing/dance along to) a wide variety of music.
• Science and Nature: Fill up the pool or tub and give the kids things (and let them find their own options) to test to see if they float or sink.  (Who doesn’t like playing in water?)
• Academic: Read at least 15 minutes per day, find things to count—especially in the teens, since each kid seems to skip a different number in that range.

Please note: This does not mean that I will forbid my children from doing puzzles, riding their bikes, painting, and rolling things down the slide because they don’t happen to be on my weekly goal list.  Nor does it mean that I will duct-tape a pencil to my kid’s hand if he’s not in the mood to work on writing or tie her up and make her dance like a marionette if she’s not feeling the beat.  This is simply my way of giving myself go-to activities for those moments when my kids need distraction and I’m drawing a blank.  It’s also my way of helping myself to notice the work I am doing with my kids on a daily basis anyhow; making a list like this serves to prove to me that I’m making strides with my kids and being deliberate about my parenting, doing the best I can to equip my little folk to be the best they can be.

What have you decided to prioritize in your parenting?

purposeful parenting

To some extent, our kids will learn despite us.  They are constantly observing, experimenting, and generally soaking up information about the world around them.  But it certainly doesn’t hurt to be purposeful about encouraging their learning.

Beginning when my kids are old enough to interact and play, I help them learn the words to describe the world around them—the names of their toys and of household objects, ways of describing items (comparatively, numerically, or by attributes like color or shape).  It’s not that I strap my kids into a booster and show them flashcards until they’ve got their facts memorized; to some extent, it’s not even conscious teaching, but rather a natural way of interacting with little ones.

As they get older, my role has become a bit more active, more purposeful.  As my kids grow, I find myself intentionally helping them to develop in three areas: knowledge, skills, and values.

The numbered leaf pictures on my kitchen wall

I want my kids to love learning.  To that end, I try to encourage their curiosity and build on their interests.  When I noticed my kids counting the pictures on our kitchen wall, I labeled each picture with a number to help them recognize numerals.  When they ask a question, I answer as honestly and thoroughly as possible (while taking their age into account); if I don’t know the answer, I tell them so and take time to look it up.  I search online for books that will help them expand knowledge of a current obsession (trains or how plumbing works, for example) and then check to see if my local library system has any of the likely candidates I’ve found.  Most of the things I do cost no money, but they encourage my kids natural acquisition of knowledge and show them that I value their questions and interests.

I also want my kids to develop certain skills.  At a most basic level, I want them to be independent—to learn how to dress themselves and use the bathroom alone, how to pour a drink and use the tools they’ll encounter in daily living.  Some of those things are taught directly, through helping them get dressed (“Remember to pull the pants over your rear end or they’ll get stuck!”) and letting them cook with me.  Some of this is taught indirectly, through toys and activities that help them develop coordination and motor skills.

But parenting isn’t just about helping your kids learn their colors or encouraging them to use a fork, it’s also about passing on your values, things like respecting people and property, being considerate and helpful.  Those things are both harder and easier to teach.  In large part, kids learn values by watching those around them; you know, “Actions speak louder than words.”  The purposeful part here comes in considering how to model your values for your kids and ensuring that you do so regularly.  Every family will have its own set of core values and ways of demonstrating those values.

As part of my personal goal-setting (see my previous post), I’m in the process of making myself a list of weekly parenting goals beginning in September, after my Summer of Insanity is over.  I hope to increase my sense of fulfillment and encourage my kids’ learning through more purposeful parenting.

the mediocre housewife (part 1)

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much of a cook.  My husband blames it on my family: we eat to live. Growing up, my family enjoyed our meals much like you would enjoy scrubbing the tub—that is to say, your chore might smell nice and have a satisfying result, but it was purely business.  My mother had a modest repertoire of casserole recipes inherited from her mother.  She made sure we didn’t eat the same food every night of the week and tried to make her meals relatively healthy and balanced, but that was as far as it went.

His family, by contrast, eats for the sheer joy of eating.  ‘Love can remember a good meal long after it’s digested and gone—years, even.  I’ve known him to refer to one of my friends from high school as “the one who had that really good sauce on the fruit salad at her reception” five years after the fact.  His paternal grandmother is renowned for her cooking.  The first time I ever saw a large number of adults literally run to get their food was at my first Christmas with his family.  When dinner was announced, my husband and his mostly 20-something cousins all scrambled to get in line for food—as did their parents.  (As a side note, they have good reason to run.  Grandma makes a mean prime rib for Christmas dinner, and it’s accompanied by—among other things— a mashed potato concoction that never lasts long enough for seconds.  Dessert consists of several different homemade pies, along with Christmas cookies, fudge, and other treats.  If all the grandkids still make an effort to show up for Christmas Day even though they’re grown and starting families of their own, it says something about the meal—and the family.)

Which leads us to this: ‘Love works out of the house.  I don’t.  He loves to cook.  I don’t.  But if we wait for him to get home and make dinner, our whole family would keel over of starvation—if we didn’t kill one another with crankiness, first.  So I make dinner and try to have it ready for us to eat as soon as he has arrived home and changed clothes. 

In the early years of our marriage, I would regularly serve dinner, only to realize (not on my own, but via my husband’s dismayed comments) that I had failed to consider that I should, perhaps, serve something other than the main dish.  Yep, that’s right: I would whip up my casserole or bake my bogliolati (delicious, by the way) and serve it as the whole meal. 

Until we had children, I didn’t always care enough to remedy this situation.  Once they came along, I found myself wanting meals to go a little farther and thinking it wise to encourage vegetable consumption.  Having only just begun eating vegetables myself, my side dishes are not all that adventurous.  (I may have been the world’s most picky eater, surviving most of my childhood solely on applesauce because vegetables—and most other foods, including at various times chicken, any meat that was not chicken, pasta with sauce, pasta without sauce, anything slightly squishy, anything vaguely crunchy, and any mixture of flavors, just to name a few—made me shudder in disgust.  I once vomited when my mother forced me to eat a bean.  One. Bean.  Yes, I left it in the toilet as proof—and got in trouble for it.)

Currently, my staple sides include corn, beans, potatoes, and broccoli.  Those items are cheap and generally well-received in our household.  I still can’t tolerate the texture of squash or cooked carrots (unless they’ve been completely obliterated in a crock pot), and my husband dislikes peas; uncooked carrots dislike my husband.  I still haven’t achieved my husband’s ideal of two sides per meal, and I likely never will—sad, but true.  I just don’t think of it, and I’m not creative enough (or rich enough) to come up with two side options for every meal we eat even if I DID try to do so.

So where does this leave me?  I’m pretty sure that this treatise proves to all who cared to read it that I am truly, as my title indicates, a mediocre housewife.  Maybe that is even generous, given the evidence presented here (and that to come).  Here, however, is the sticking point: I am left wondering whether merely “mediocre” is acceptable.  I’ve made a point of trying to provide some variety of flavors and balance of foods in our diet, but I’m not sure how well I really do.  Is it okay to settle for “good enough” when it comes to family meal planning?  How is a mommy supposed to know?

the curse of a goal-oriented mommy

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a stay-at-home mommy.  What I didn’t realize (until after my dream came true) is that I am cursed.  Not only have I been cursed with lackluster breasts (which I really don’t mind, except for that year or so when my kids—and my budget—could really use their help), but, more vitally, I am cursed with a need to achieve.  That’s right, I am a goal-oriented person.  This never struck me as being remotely problematic until I became a mother.

Picture this:  You are a goal-oriented individual.  You are a stay-at-home mom.   Thus, your goal in life is to raise your children—ideally, you’d like them to be responsible, compassionate, respectful, productive citizens, among other things.  Depending on your point of view, you will achieve your goal either when your kids move out on their own (which is getting later and later these days) or when you or your children die.  Either way, there’s not much to encourage a goal-oriented person.

Break it down further, you say.  Okay, we’ll work with just a single day.  Your goal for the day is to survive the day, make sure your children survive the day, and (ideally) keep everyone fed, clothed, and more-or-less happy while maintaining a decently clean house.  Evidence of achieving your goal?  At the end of the day, you, your children, and your house are all still standing.  Again, not very thrilling.

I have found this lack of measurable achievement to be intensely frustrating.  Here I am, living my dream (though perhaps a bit different than my idealized vision as a child), and yet I feel unfulfilled.  It makes me feel as if I’m failing my kids by not reveling in the time I spend sitting (not allowed to touch anything—otherwise it suddenly becomes more compelling than any other object in the room and must immediately be taken away by my children; or else whatever I am doing is wrong because it doesn’t fit with a toddler or preschooler’s suddenly-invented-and-constantly-changing rules for whatever game we’re playing) and watching their every move or participating in the 397^th round of “Here-Mommy-Taste-This-Pretend-Cookie-I-Made”.  If I’m not enjoying every moment of motherhood, am I a failure as a mother?

Here’s my solution to (hopefully) help myself feel more fulfilled and, thus, more competent as a mommy:  more goals.

For starters, I’ve broken down my “clean house” goal into a daily task that I can check off my mental list.  But that one little check mark hasn’t been enough.  So I’ve added to the list.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Over the summer, I’m going to ponder things I want my children to internalize, things like an understanding of their (well, so far my and my husband’s) faith, a good foundation in the Bible, an outward-focused perspective that notices and cares for the needs of others, an awareness of their context in the world, responsibility and good manners, an appreciation of the arts, a willingness to try new things and accept failure as progress…as well as exploring and learning such basics as their shapes, colors, numbers, and letters.

There are also some things I want to do for me.  I want to continue to feed my passions for reading, writing, and creating.  I want to make more of an effort to connect to others and build relationships.  I want to maintain a healthy marriage and a healthy faith life and be the best mom I can be.

With so many desires, I could make an endless list of steps to achieve these.  In the future, I’ll share some the ways I’ll be working toward the goals I have for my children and our family.  As for me—I’ve begun to spend my evenings reading, writing, and (currently) sewing.  I’ve joined a MOMS Club, and I’m making an effort to participate in as many activities as our schedule and our budget allow.  My husband and I spend time talking together and doing devotions immediately after the kids are in bed and, with my mom’s help, we set aside time for a monthly date.  I’ve also started this blog, another way for me to visually achieve something related to both my mothering and my love of writing.  We shall see where all this plotting leads me…