So, if you're looking for a perfect parenting blog, keep looking, clearly this isn't it.
My kids are old enough to spend the night alone. Well one is an adult and very capable of watching out for his sisters so I took advantage of that fact last night and had a date with my husband. Glorious! I came home to reality today though, to a sink full of dishes and a messy house. Clothes that were left out and food that was not put away. Glorious to gross in 60 seconds flat.
I got most of that straightened away, with begrudged help from the guilty parties, and came up to my office to find Karissa, my youngest, had changed my dry erase calendar. Ok I will admit that this is really silly but I am pretty controlling when it comes to things like calendars. Its how I know what I have to do and I am really precise about what goes on there. She asked if she could do it this month because its her birthday but I had specifically told her not to do it, that I would handle it when I got home. She was very proud of herself and told me that she had worked really hard on it and figured out the dates all by herself but instead of using that moment as a chance to praise her initiative I took the low road and chose to use it as a moment of discipline. I reminded her that I told her to not to do it when she asked yesterday and that I had a lot of things that needed to go on it so the numbers needed to be small because of it. She was upset and while I comforted her I still didn't give in. I really should have taken the high road and saw the good in it but at that point it was just one more thing that hadnt been done the way I asked for them to be done. I took a break and prayed about it. I was reminded that it wasn't too long ago that she couldn't make numbers small enough to fit on that calendar at all, and that in the grand scheme of things, it was really a tiny little blip. She made a huge step to help and I shot her down. I hate being wrong but I knew I was. Enough excuses. I had to make it right.
I brought her back upstairs. I sat down with her and apologized and told her that I was wrong. I said that parents aren't perfect and while she still disobeyed me I knew that she was trying to help. She was excited to be responsible enough to do the calendar and to help me. So I erased everything and we started all over. I wrote down the things I needed to do and she got to write in all the dates and make the rest of the notes. She walked away with her head held high and proud of herself again.
This is one of those parenting moments when you feel like an utter failure. I feel absolutely petty and honestly, pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. I salvaged what I could and I hope she remembers that I was woman enough to admit that I was wrong and tried to fix it.
