As you might have remembered from earlier this week, I wrote about my middle daughter taking a growing up step by helping move my china across the house.  In a few weeks, she’s going to need to take another big growing step up.

When my oldest comes home from her surgery, she’s going to be moving around pretty slowly.  She will be restricted in a way that she won’t be expected to do her usual chores for several weeks.  I know everyone’s
been expecting and waiting for it to happen, but it will be different when it actually happens.

While it’s unpleasant to think about my older daughter’s discomfort in the near future, it’s also hard to picture it right now.  She is as bouncy as ever with endless energy and strength.  So right now, our middle daughter’s need to step up to a higher level of responsibility is mostly just an idea.

She’s already been practicing a little, enjoying the new task.  But I think it will mean something completely different to her when the idea finally meets the reality before us.  My oldest will be sitting still, perhaps feeling pain, and obviously not showing her same vim and vigor.  The gravity of the situation will hit her and she will need to decide – am I really ready for this quick growing up step?

This whole surgery thing is nothing that I would wish on my oldest daughter if it wasn’t totally necessary.  However, I am seeing some opportunities for growth for each of the kids.  My middle can take on some tasks she’s been dying to try.  My youngest can officially move up to the “number two” helper.  And my oldest will find out how patient and creative she can be when she can’t do what she wants to do.

Some growing up steps you take when you think you are ready, and some you take when you aren’t ready.  Nonetheless, it’s a chance to see what you are made of.  And funny, those growing up opportunities still seem to come at you even when you are a …

Sometimes, we parents make discipline too hard for ourselves.  We come up with complex behavior charts, a million rules, and use methods don’t seem to make a dent.  When in doubt, try natural consequences.

You might think that some problems don’t have a good natural consequence.  Like getting bad grades – what could you do about the grades after they’ve already happened?  Well, it will help you to get a quicker handle on your kid’s grades.  Just checking the report card once a quarter might not be enough.  Many schools are using online systems where parents can see grades in nearly real time.  Most teachers now use email for quick correspondence.

If you take this approach, you can see a bad trend when it starts.  Once you notice something is going south, you can take note of what else is going on around your kid.  Are you allowing them a little too much friend time?  Are they being lazy?  Are they having vision, hearing, emotional, or drug problems?  As you can see, handling a child’s homework problem may not be as simple as grounding them for a month.

By now, you might also be noticing that giving a child discipline may not mean giving any sort of punishment.  Discipline is about teaching.  A consequence is simply a possible outcome from a situation, good or bad.  So if your child ends up having a vision problem, the natural consequence is that you’ll get them glasses.  You then discipline them about the care and proper use of their glasses.

A natural consequence of learning they have an emotional problem is more communication and possibly professional counseling.  A natural consequence of being lazy is to not earn the rights and privileges of people who work hard.  They earn their entertainment and freedoms as they maintain productive behaviors. Rather than just grounding them for X amount of time, you teach them responsibility and appreciation for their leisure time.  A natural consequence of staying up too late and talking in bed is to get them up early and make them really tired for bed …

The clothes get too short, the shoes get too small, the vocabulary grows, and I get closer to making level eye contact with them every year.  I guess it’s OK to start letting them do a few more challenging things.  Sigh…no guarantees that things will turn out well every time, but how else do they learn?

A few weeks ago, my oldest learned how to make an omelet at school.  She’s nine, so I suppose she’s at an age where she “gets it” about being careful with heat, but I was very reluctant to believe she’d be doing that in my house any time soon.  A few days later, with some convincing, I allowed her to do it only if I did the cutting (veggies) and hovered over her every move.

She did a fine job and was confidently careful with all the hot stuff.  Her sisters turned her into a short order cook and she ended up making four omelets that morning.  Hmm.  Not bad.  I even let her do it again just this
week.  I did the cutting again and didn’t leave the room, but I resigned to watch with concern from a little farther away.  I don’t think I’m ready to turn her over to regular saute’ duty or anything like that, but she just took a big growing up step.  I could be OK with a few omelets now and then.

I’ve been painting the kitchen this week and have had to shift and displace many things.  When I cleared out the china hutch, I just had everything on the counter.  I decided to clean them before moving them somewhere else for a few days.  My middle daughter, age seven, asked if she could move them for me.  Ummm…….well, I thought about my oldest doing the omelet and decided this could probably work.

I know that even though she isn’t as old as my omelet cooker, she is very careful and steady when working with something of value to her.  I had a feeling she would understand the value my china had to me as well.  …

It’s so easy to slip into a “what have you done for me lately” attitude when you are married with kids.  Everyone’s doing something, being busy, needing to go here or there, the house needs to be vacuumed, people have to eat, yard work looms, etc.  But getting stuck in a “poor me” mindset is a quick way to turn parenting and marriage into a self-imposed prison.

Your attitude about your spouse is what matters if you want to be treated well.  Yes, I said “your” attitude.  This isn’t a woman thing or a man thing – it matters for both people in the relationship.  The side effects of whatever you do with each other, good or bad, eventually trickle down to the children.  It all counts for the whole family.  Let’s presume that you are with a decent person, not abusive, not addicted to drugs, etc.  If that’s your situation, then you have a different problem and these suggestions will not help much.

When you start with a “poor me” thought, you start indulging yourself.  I’m always the only one getting stuff done around here, he/she doesn’t care if I get to relax, I never get a compliment from my husband/wife, etc.  Now if you are with that decent person, chances are this is somewhat of an exaggeration.  Hint – anytime you find yourself using the words “always” and “never”, beware of a pity party.  Maybe your husband really has never picked up his dirty socks.  But most likely, those are red flags for feeling sorry for yourself.

First of all, being all sorry for yourself is not attractive to your mate.  Second, you are more likely to take any compliment or casual comment from your mate in the wrong way when you think like this.  They can’t win either way.  And the more you keep thinking this way, the more you may continue seeing your life at home like this.  By snapping at your partner or giving the silent sufferer treatment, you get to hold all the brooding
emotional power.

Really, this isn’t a fun way to go …

I know I’ve always been kind of a clutterbug.  My room didn’t stay clean for long when I was growing up.  My room in college was always just barely functional (what vacuum?).   As a newlywed, I could care less if my spices were in alphabetical order.  And then it hit – motherhood.  The Mother of all clutter challenges.

When I became a mom, I had to not only deal with my own clutter issues about my stuff, I now had a new person’s stuff to manage.  My husband got the neatness and organization gene in his blood.  I missed that one.  But who’s generally in charge of the swarm of belongings that orbits around a baby all day long?  Mommy.  Yep, good old organization-flawed Me.

Another blow of misfortune to this uphill battle was my postpartum depression.  So now, instead of just dealing with my stuff and my baby’s stuff, I had MENTAL stuff piled on top of it all.  I didn’t live in a pigsty or
worry about the health department stopping in.  But I didn’t deal much with anything that had already piled up before she arrived.

I started feeling like I was probably not living up to being the mother I was supposed to be.  I couldn’t get it together – my kid seemed OK, but my house was a wreck and so was I.  It seemed like I could either put my
energy towards raising a pretty good kid OR I could put my energy toward having a good looking home.  Notice I didn’t really give myself much energy to work with.  I chose my kid, so you can imagine what everything else looked like for a long time.

Even since my depression has gone away, I still find myself putting things somewhere “for a moment”, only to realize that they are still sitting there three weeks later.  Thankfully, I don’t feel so completely burdened by it anymore.  Instead of thinking how bad of a mom I am, I just shrug my shoulders and say, “Um, I’ll get to that tomorrow,” and move on.  I still have …

As the surgery nears, it’s making me think back to all the landmarks of time that have passed since my daughter was a baby.  It’s stunning to believe she is almost ten years old.  Unfortunately, many moments during her baby years were overshadowed by my depression.

Since my girls were so young when it happened, I don’t think they would guess I had so much sadness and self-torture inside back then.   The depression drained me of much of my energy, liveliness, and confidence.  I gave whatever I had left to my girls.

I put forth a Herculean effort to be there for them, which is what it took to survive through the depression some days.  Yet I seem to have fewer clear memories of their baby days than I would like.  I have enough pictures to remind me, but I know I spent so many hours right next to their face doing important things.  Why did those years have to be tinged with anguish??

I have thought about this many times.  If I had the opportunity to get a hold of a time machine somehow, I would hold my two oldest girls as babies just for five minutes.  Five crystal clear minutes to be a sponge and soak it all up.  Their smell, their sounds, their tiny veins and fingernails and even my one girl’s non-repaired lip.  Just five minutes with nothing but a warm aura around us.  Love, hope, joy, and freedom.

I had a very positive postpartum time with my youngest.  Well, aside from it being very busy with a toddler and a preschooler.  But those moments of connection, unburdened by heavy emotions – I had enough of me to give to the girls and to keep for myself.  I could soak her up and it seemed to stick better.

I truly don’t think my depression affected them in any long-lasting way, which I am grateful for.  I am quite close to all three of my girls, which is the most wonderful gift I could have hoped for in my darkest days.  That’s a good thing since puberty …

I realize I just wrote about social norms a few days ago, but I had another real life experience involving kids and a totally inappropriate adult.  This is exactly why social awareness and manners really count.

I was just at my daughter’s dance recital this evening, a somewhat long but entertaining event that I really enjoy going to.  There’s a good mix of older and younger kids to create a show with variety.  The staff is professional, appreciative of everyone involved, and the kids work hard for them.  I made note of a special announcement before the performance, reminding people to turn off their cell phones and not to yell or scream names of performers between songs.  I thought, “Well why is that ‘no yelling’ reminder even necessary?  This is my fourth year attending and nothing like that has ever happened.”

Until tonight.

One woman yelled out names of various girls not once, not twice, but five separate times in between some of the songs when everything else is silent.  Like “GO JULIE! WHOOOO!”  Completely loud and impossible to miss.  The last (fifth) one happened to be right before my daughter’s last song, and I was so irritated by this continual rude behavior that I didn’t even realize my daughter’s group was dancing until almost halfway through the song.

I felt distracted, irritated, and disappointed that someone was so blatantly disregarding a common performance courtesy over and over.  This was no marching band show, or halftime at a basketball game, or a gymnastics demonstration where you are encouraged to cheer your kids on.  Yelling is expected and tolerated during those situations.  I’ve done those kinds of performances, and blocking out noise is part of the deal.  This was a darkened auditorium with a lit stage and girls with beautiful costumes.  Classy and professional.  You shouldn’t need to learn how to handle rude audience member noise at a dance recital.

It isn’t encouraging to the girl who’s name is being blurted out.  It’s cowardly because it happens in the cover of darkness.  There’s a “let’s see if I can get under …

As a parent, you know your child is one-of-a-kind.  And it’s absolutely true -regardless of physical or mental similarities, each person on the planet is completely unique.  It’s an overwhelming thought to ponder, and wondrous because you know you have a special gift in your child.  However, there can be too much of a good thing.

There’s a fine line with giving praise and complements to your child.  Of course, you want them to  understand that they are a worthy human being deserving of love and attention.  They have talents to develop and all kinds of potential to give to the world.  But parents can sometimes go a little too far with the praise.

Overpraising can go one of two ways.  Either the child takes every word to heart and becomes spoiled with a side of entitlement, or the child starts seeing the praise as overblown and insincere.  Neither of these outcomes is good for you or your child.

You’ve probably met or spent time with kids who are pretty spoiled.  They know their parents will do anything for them because they are so special.  In fact, they sometimes become too special to relate well to others or to have empathy.  The point is not just for the child to know they are special, but for everyone else to know, too.  People who are too special don’t always think rules apply to them and may have trouble being humbled.

A kid who starts to see through the flashy words may start to doubt that any of it is true.  If it’s all so overblown, maybe it’s all a lie.  They are really so mediocre that their parents have to make things up.  They may start thinking that anyone who compliments them is being fake.  If a child really takes this to heart, their self worth and self esteem can suffer.

It’s really OK to tell your child that they are special because they truly are.  The point is to not overdo it so it actually causes them problems down the road.  Just be sure you throw in enough about cooperation, …

Having a depressed spouse and parent in the family creates a difficult problem.  The parents are supposed to be the leaders, the example setters, the encouragers both to each other and to their children.  When one of the adults has big mental health problems, this changes the balance and affects everyone.

Here’s how the dynamic can go:

You spouse has found themselves in a deep hole from circumstances beyond their control.  This could be health problems, job issues, financial responsibilities that have gone badly, fallouts with friends of family, etc.  These circumstances leave them depressed and not functioning well.

You see they are in the hole and try to help without falling in yourself.  Up around the edge of the hole, you find a few things that look useful.  There’s a map of how other people have gotten out of similar holes, showing footholds and good ways to make the climb up.  You find a long rope with knots, which looks like it could hold your spouse’s weight.  You also find a few shovels that they could use to change the shape of the hole and more easily climb out themselves.  It seems there are other possibly useful things around the hole as you keep looking, but you are sure one of these will work.

You tell your spouse about all these solutions up here at the top of the hole, hoping to provide some encouragement.  It is dark down there and they are feeling lonely.

You throw the rope down and tell them how you think they could use it to climb up.  You assure them that you and others will hold it tightly as they climb up the knots.

Your spouse tosses the rope back up.  Says there’s no way.

Confused but undetered, you toss down the map of how others have climbed there way out of holes like this.  You explain that the directions are thorough and they just need to follow them.  You will be up at the top making sure the way stays clear of any falling rocks or dirt, and will be ready to grab their …