The New Approach

I came home last night determined to shut up as much as possible. They told me when I walked into the house that it was clean. And I will give them this. It was tidy. But everyone had obviously shirked on their chores while i was gone and did a quick run through to make it look like I they had cleaned well, when really they hadn't. However, I ignored that and took time to talk to each of the kids about their week.

I had a couple of interactions with both Mike and John which were actually fairly positive because I stated what I had to say once, did not repeat myself, and spent the rest of the time listening. Both of them making it to every shift this week, 40 hours each, is a huge accomplishment. And even though I didn't give them everything they asked for, we still didn't have a fight.

I talked with Sadie about how she felt about life in her room when Salinda is here (they left to go back to his house before I got home) and it seems she is unaffected and fine with the way things work. I think the two of them had a very nice time together here. He was not distracted by his friends, there was no pressure from his family, and the three of them (Sal, bf and Gabby) had a lot of peaceful quality time together. All of the rest of it.... I gotta let it go.

Tony was excited to tell me about his upcoming pops concert but when he walked into the room from his tennis match the odor was almost oppressive. But I made no comment about that and listened to him tell me about something that he really loves.

Who would have thought that the best parenting strategy I could offer myself would be to shut up?

My brain again awakened long before my body needed to be out of bed this morning, but I'm up any way. During the Saturdays in May we are allowed in our town to dumb our garbage at the land fill for free and so we are going to get major cleaning junk throwing away done. Most people can do things like donate their used furniture (I know, I know, those of you with kids like mine are cracking up). We just store it somewhere until it's Spring Clean-up Days and out it goes, full of holes, ripped up, looking like it's been used for 20 years wehn we bought it new four years ago..... sigh.

I told three of hte boys we would start at 8:30. I was so motivated yesterday morning that I"m hoping I'll have an hour of motivation this morning to get things crossed of my never ending to-do list. Then we're going out to tear about the nearly completely torn apart trampoline and get it out of the backyard... among many other things.

I swear if you saw our backyard you'd think we were from the south.

(OK, OK, I can feel the vegetables being thrown at me from Cindy's garden now....)