Giving New Meaning to Parenting

Things are back to normal here after my younger son’s (YS) surgery. Well, maybe I should clarify that. While he was officially cleared this morning and my MIL left last week, we are attempting to get back into our daily schedule. Except that there’s one not so small problem: the bad habits we developed during YS’s two weeks of bed rest. Since we were supposed to keep him from getting upset and thus hurting his throat (he’s two, so I probably would have more success climbing Mt. Everst) we pretty much let him have whatever he wanted. Then our older son (OS) got upset, and as an older sibling I can say rightfully so. YS was having everything handed to him on a plate, sometimes literally, so we started breaking our usual rules for OS as well.

The result? The TV went from being on for about 45 minutes a day to being on practically all day. Toys and crumbs are scattered everywhere from various snacks and meals that are usually are eaten at the table but instead have been eaten in front of our TV which seemed to play Cars on a circular track. When I think back on it, the true miracle is not that YS’s recovery went so well, but that my husband and I haven’t broken our ankles on a Lighting McQueen toy car. Don’t laugh, my triathlon training buddy sprained her ankle slipping on one of her kids’ toy cars last year.

Thus today I decided to embrace the attitude that small steps accumulate to cover great distances (or some life mantra like that) and started trying to enforce old rules again. I simply had to reduce the amount of TV, because if I watched one more Little Mermaid episode I was going to lose it. I also tried to move the boys back the table for meals and snacks. This was a little hard as for the first time in 2 years, my older son had a fever. There was not surprisingly a ton of crying about the fact that the TV only ran for half the day.

Tomorrow we will work on the toys. A few days ago I found the missing cat for our Dogopoly game: How did I find it? I stepped on it.

by Alex Elliot

Photo graciously provided by Abraxas3d, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved