Just a Typical Week

So another week is ending and I guess it's been a fairly quiet one, but I still thought I'd share some of the recent highlights that make parenting a rollercoaster experience.

First, this week M and J were visited by the House Fairy. If you have no idea what that is, it's a program I learned about from Flylady, and the general idea is to get children enthusiastic about keeping their rooms clean using a rather unique rewards system. They get videos from the House Fairy, who we've learned, is Santa's sister. If your parents request it of her, she will come visit your room once a week and check it to see if it's clean. If it is, she'll leave a surprise, kind of like the tooth fairy.

Well, I've tried everything I could think of to work with my kids on keeping their rooms neat. In general, it's been a flat failure, making both the kids and me miserable. So I thought I could give this a try. So I showed a couple videos introducing the program, and M was just thrilled at the thought of a fairy visiting her room and leaving a surprise. Now M is not my clean child at all. Well, none of them are, but she was the hardest to motivate in any way. But lo and behold, by the time she went to bed the first night her room was as clean as she could get it, even under the beds and in the closet.
(There is still the problem of applesauce splattered all over the walls and carpet, the pencil scribblings, and the torn wallpaper, but one thing at a time, right?) In the morning she was thrilled to find a letter from the House Fairy, a membership card, and a little sticky hand toy. Ever since, she has kept on top of her room impressively. Even though she looked at the "fairy dust" (glitter) that the House Fairy had left and told me doubtfully that it didn't look like real fairy dust. Whatever that looks like!

J, however, was not impressed. His attitude was pretty much "Whatever, Mom." So he simply ignored his hurricane-hit room. Oh, well. You can't win them all. Maybe after he sees the little surprises that M keeps getting he'll want to cooperate a bit more. Just to make our lives even less boring, he decided to climb up on the fence and break large branches off our neighbor's newly planted trees. Terence got the angry phone call about that one. Apparently, nothing is safe, not even on the other side of a six foot block wall.

B has pretty much confined herself to the normal also. She crawled back in the corner behind our new living room furniture and scribbled with green marker on the side of the couch and the bottom of the corner table. It was so carefully hidden that I didn't find it for days. I might not have even seen it when I did (I can't really wedge myself back there) except that I was seaching high and low for my missing cell phone and M's missing school book. Oh, well. At least it was washable marker.

I keep repeating to myself that it's just a stage, and usually it works . . . except at the end of the day when I'm exhausted and hormonally weepy and alone, and then I wonder what in the world was I thinking? What made me think I was cut out to be a parent? I know my own weaknesses as a parent, of course, and sometimes I just want to give up. Yet this week I've been reviewing a parenting manual for a class I took last fall, and one quote in particular struck me: "We fail not when our children fail, but when we fail to keep trying to resolve our conflicts." (This comes from an old LDS Social Services manual called Becoming a Better Parent.) Basically, I've turned it into a new reminder for myself. In essence, I only fail as a parent when I give up. So I guess I'll keep plodding along for another week, trying to do better. I just hope that this coming week does NOT include more marker on the couch or broken tree branches!