Flowers

Yesterday, I read this blog post about parenting. It was tough to read because I could have written that post. Not word for word, but certainly the basics were there: the frustration, the anger, the constant frowning and grouchiness, children who seem to have picked up strange habits. I decided that I needed to make a change. I needed to start seeing the flowers rather than the weeds.

I saw my first flower today. I came home from my church job and the middletons (the 3 and 5 year olds) had all of the party streamers out and were decorating the house. My first thought was, “Nooo! WHAT are you doing?” I just shook my head and walked away, trying really hard to just ignore it. But, I couldn’t just ignore it. They were blocking off the whole house, we couldn’t move around. So, I told them it was time to clean up. Amazingly, the 5 year old cheerily started putting them away.

But wait, I still hadn’t seen the flower. I was still annoyed and scowling. I told myself, “Snap out of it!”, and forced myself to say something positive to the 5 year old.

“What pretty decorations you guys put up today.”
“Very festive.”

But I was still annoyed, so no flower.

Then, the 3 year starting crying that he didn’t want to put them away. “Waaaaaah” I really, really wanted to just be steely faced and say, “Too bad, these aren’t toys, they are going away.” Instead, I gave him 3 very short strings of streamers to use. Problem solved. He was happy and I didn’t have a giant mess.

The first flower just bloomed.