Battle Picking

I am currently at a hotel with Salinda for her 13th birthday party. This will be the only overnight-at-a-hotel birthday party of her life that we pay for because we seldom splurge like this. There are many reasons for this choice, first and foremost being that 95% of the time, regardless of her teenagerness, moodiness, and mouthiness when she is mad. She is the kind of daughter anyone would LOVE to have and sometimes I can't stop myself for rewarding her. Having Tony and Dominyk as little brothers and not killing them is something to be rewarded.

As I was sitting at the indoor water park a few minutes ago thinking back to when we were here five or six years ago. As a treat for labor day, we brought the family here overnight as a "gooodbye to summer." My vivid memory of the weekend was the stress of Kyle, then 13, not wanting to spend any time with us and wanting to be in the hotel room watching TV. Now my thinking was, "if we're paying all this money and you don't want to be with us, then stay home and watch TV." We tried to force him to join the other kids in the pool and join us in having "family fun" and it ruined the day. (well, it wasn't exactly destined to be that fun anyway -- Dominyk was 3 and running WILD all over the place, we had 4 kids under 6, and it was exhausting).

Thinking back to that now, I realize that I have gotten much better at picking my battles. I have let go of my visions of everyone having a good time. I am content to look for a moment or two of joy each day and be satisfied with that. I look more for improvement than perfection. I abandoned several of my expectations years ago and am content to find a few things that I can be proud of.

One of the things that I have realized as our children have grown, is that parenting is hard stuff. I think I even used that naughty word "sucks" to describe it. As kids hit their teens, regardless of if they are kids by birth or adoption, it is VERY difficult to control the decisions they make. When I compare some of our kids to their peers, good kids, raised in good homes, by good parents, my kids are not all THAT far behind them. Sure, they have different issues to deal with, but in many cases they are making better choices than the folks around them.

So as I age (and boy, am I aging) I'm seeing more and more how my parenting style is changing. I'm picking only the most serious battles, and those I am winning. The rest I'm letting go of and moving on. I could continue to site examples, but you're bright, you've figured it out by now.