Parental High

Every once in awhile, there are moments when I feel like I'm doing this parenting thing right. Today, I had one of those moments. For the first time in over a year, I helped the girls clean their room.
They usually do it themselves. They usually fight while they do. Then usually I yell, "STOP FIGHTING!" Then they somehow figure out who's going to do what and it gets mostly cleaned.

Today, when I started cleaning the room without saying a word to them, Cami seemed bothered. (We'll leave Abby out of this blog.) She came in the room and started tossing things from her toy box(es) into the Goodwill bag. I guess she was smart enough to realize that toys were going to go and she wanted to have a say in which ones. She did SUCH a good job getting rid of things. What was FOUR containers of Barbie items is now ONE. The entire room took us more than four hours and she was a hard little worker the whole time. While we were finishing up she gave me a big hug and very sincerely said, "Thank you so much for helping us clean our room, especially the Barbie stuff, it was so overloading me." It was a proud parent moment. Not only did she appreciate my help but she recognized that it was HER job, HER responsibility.

Still on my high, I tackled the yard. Blake volunteered to be my helper. I cut down the thorn bush behind the shed and he put the branches in the can. He picked up the sticks, I mowed the grass. No complaints and no tears, not even when one of the thorns was big enough to poke through his gloves and draw blood.

Maybe I'm not screwing these kids up. :) They DO know how to work hard. As for Abby... well, God made her extremely BOOK SMART. She's sure to find a career that makes her rich enough to hire people to do the manual labor for her.

Welcome to my blog

I finally decided on a name for my blog. It just came to me moments ago. There really isn't any story behind it, just something I say fairly often.

I'm still not sure what the specific topic of this blog will be. It may not even have one. We'll just have to wait and see...