Its been three months. How am I adjusting to four kids? I’m not really.
Well I mean obviously we are adjusting slightly, otherwise one of us would be dead for lack of feeding and watering.
So we are adjusting, but it’s not graceful, it’s loud, it’s sometimes mean and it’s bumpy to say the least.
1 has recently presented quite the attitude to us. She is bossy and full of “but I” and “it’s just” statements after everything we say or correct.
She’s also a story teller, of the forever long sort. I’m fairly certain she’s making it up as she goes and so there is a lag time between what she’s thinking and what she’s saying. It all makes it very hard to pay attention long enough for her to finish, especially when other children are interrupting to ask something or show you the latest whatever they’ve created. Teaching a six year old how to be concise is very difficult. I want to be present in the moment and truly listen to what she is saying but it’s hard y’all. My mind wanders and comes back to the moment and she’s still not even a third of the way through what she’s trying to say. Apparently this is normal for six year olds, which makes me wonder if maybe it’s me? Maybe I just don’t really like six year olds? Obviously I love my daughter, I just don’t love the ramblings. Don’t even get me started on how she will begin clearly and at a volume that’s easy to hear but as she goes on, and on, and on and on some more, she progressively gets quiet and mumbles so I find myself saying “what”. “SPEAK UP”. “I can’t HEAR you”. “I have no idea what you said for the last five minutes because you were mumbling”. Or my personal favorite “you started talking, turned away from me and started mumbling, I didn’t hear a word you said”. All of those phrases are repeated just about every time she starts telling a story.
Its exasperating. This inevitably leads to my short tempered responses that are more forceful than I’d like them to be, especially toward the end of the day.
And as of late, I’ve realized my daughters attitude, it’s just her mimicking me. Her “tone” is the exact tone I use when I’m frustrated, annoyed or dare I say it, exasperated by her.
Talk about feeling convicted. Ooooof I mean I know the obvious things right, like hate isn’t inherent it’s taught. And the same goes for other awful things in this world. Let me tell you, sass, personality that is all unique to children but tone, attitude, word choice (this one stings in particular, I’ll be writing shortly about curbing my language to curb number 2’s) and so on, that is allllll learned behavior. If I’m honest it’s mostly learned from me, I can say some TV shows have been eliminated from our house, some music genres, sometimes we even limit the amount of time spent with certain friends to help reduce the influence on our children. By and large though, it’s me. It’s us as parents that teach (inadvertently) our children their bad habits.
We have started implementing new techniques, see my previous post “my pitfall: ‘convenient’ parenting”. So far I’ve managed to remain consistent and it has helped, number 1 is more joyful these days and has made the decision on several occasions to take a deep breath and let things go when she’s upset.
But I will say this,
parenting, it’s a life of servitude which means while we are trying to mold and shape our children into decent human beings we also have to mold and shape ourselves into decent human beings. It’s all just so much work. They tell you this when you talk about wanting kids, but it’s clouded by the baby clothes, the baby smells and everyone mentions sleep deprivation and challenging teen years. I am here to tell you, the biggest challenge in parenting is realizing you have a lot of work to do on yourself with every new stage of parenting.
Comments