Motherhood Musings

How are you feeling? I think it's safe to say that parenting involves a lot of emotion. Both negative and positive. I believe that our life experience needs to have all the emotions in order for us to be fulfilled in our lives. If you think about it if we don't know sadness could we know happiness? I don't think so! Without negative emotions, we wouldn't know we were experiencing positive emotions. This doesn't mean that we will like or want to feel all the emotions. We do need them though! One thing about being a parent that can be difficult to prepare for is dealing with negative emotions.  One thing I wasn't prepared for is feeling negative emotions twice, when my kids have hard experiences it hurts, and then it hurts again because they are hurting! It's like the saying "middle school is hard and even harder when your kids go through it."   Emotions don't have to be big scary monsters that we must avoid at all costs- even though we may wan...

Change is Growth I think parenting involves a lot of creative problem-solving. At our kids' elementary school they teach them this acronym for pride: P- PROBLEM SOLVER R- RESPECTFUL I- INTEGRITY D- DEDICATION E- EMPATHY They use this to teach the kids the skills they can and will develop at school. It has a little song that goes with it and it gets stuck in my head all the time because my kindergartener, Lillie, is very excited about all things school and singing (to the dismay of her siblings😂!). I love her song for many reasons, but it also helps me remember to be a problem solver in addition to reminding my kids that they can be problem solvers too! It is impossible to predict every positive or negative event that we will experience throughout our lives, right? It is curious to me that our brains want to do this when we know it's impossible. Our brains do happen to be really good at protecting us and identifying danger, which can help us solve problems and anticipate immedi...