Friday, November 15, 2013

The Best Thanksgiving Books

It's always bothered me that Thanksgiving has been swallowed up in the swirling vortex of holiday terror that "The Holidays" has become.  At our house, I refuse to put up a single Christmas decoration or hear any of out beloved Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving, and not a moment before.

One tradition we have at every holiday is to put out our favorite holiday books on the coffee table.  I've started a special page just for Holiday themed books, so you can always check there for my recommendations, but here are some of our favorites for Thanksgiving:

1621  A New Look at Thanksgiving by Catherine O'Neill and Margaret M. Bruchac is an amazing look at what Thanksgiving really was.  This book is really for older children (8 and up), as it is fairly lengthy and detailed, though you could paraphrase and share the pictures to younger children - which I've done and strongly recommend.

The First Thanksgiving by Linda Hayward and the Story of the Pilgrims by Katharine Ross are wonderful introductory books on the holiday, for children 4-8, and The Know-Nothings Talk Turkey, by Michele Sobel Spirn is a fun look at Thanksgiving that young children will enjoy.

A fun project to do with your kids this time of year is to start a Thankfulness Tree.  Cut out leaves on fall colored paper and use a hole puncher to make a hole at the base.  Have children (and parents:) write what they're thankful for and tie with ribbon to some festive dogwood branches and - voila! - you have a Thankfulness tree.

Of course, there's always the handprint turkeys - you can't really go wrong with that.  Actually painting a young child's hand and stamping it is my favorite way to do it, but there are plenty of variations.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thursday, November 14, 2013

The Best Thing I Can Do For My Kids

I am my greatest frustration as a parent.  I feel guilty and mad at myself almost daily, but when I feel my worst is when I take it out on my kids - blaming them for my own failure to live up to my own expectations. It happens more often than I'd care to admit, and it particularly happens when I've got too much on my plate - like right now, for instance.

Today, I was inspired by this post on Hands Free Mama:  The Important Thing About Yelling.  In it, the author admits that she was once a parent who yelled at her children.  She describes, in heartbreaking detail, the moment that she realized what that did to her kids and how she overcame it.

It seems that all parents today are under a kind of pressure that my mother, and her mother before her, didn't experience.  We all feel as though we're struggling and failing to succeed in some sort of ill-conceived parenting competition that exists only in our minds.

For me, being a nanny set me up for a heightened feeling of failure as a parent.  All that practice on other people's children and being known as a "professional" childcare provider for so long made me feel an enormous pressure that I had to be the perfect parent; after all, I was the expert on it, right?  Not only that, because I was both a nanny and a parent at the same time, I had a direct comparison of the perfect nanny vs. the crappy mom on a fairly regular basis.

For example:  one day, I was taking one of my girls to a violin lesson.  She was running late, but I was my usual patient and understanding self.  When we finally got into the car to leave, she said, "If my mom was taking me and we were this late, she'd be freaking out."  I said, "If you were my kid and we were this late, I'd be freaking out."

I realized in that moment that I didn't have the fun, relaxed, easy relationship that I have with my nanny kids with my own children, and it saddened me to no end.  I've never once yelled at 'my big girls' - not once!  Not just because it would be entirely unprofessional, but because I never felt the kind of pressure with them that I feel with my own children.  I never felt as though I should be doing something else when I was caring for my nanny kids; time with them was not only permitted, it was expected.  The quality of the time we spent together was valued far more than my time spent doing anything else; yet it is almost reversed in my role as a parent, and I'm not sure why.

As high of standards as I held myself to as a nanny, it doesn't come close to my expectations of myself as a mother.  These expectations, of course, are completely unrealistic but, when I'm overwhelmed, I seem to forget that too easily.  When I lose my patience with my kids, more often than not, it's really myself that I've lost patience with, but I transfer it to them.  As I'm yelling about being late again because they don't listen, inside I know that what I'm really angry about is that I didn't make enough time for them, but instead gave my time to another project that, in truth, doesn't mean anywhere near as much to me.  What I'm really angry about is that I failed again - but not just because I failed to make enough time for my kids, but because I allowed myself to believe, yet again, that being a mother was not enough.

Reading this post on Hands Free Mama was a great reminder to cut myself some slack; to pare down my to-do list so that I'm not pulled in so many directions at once; to slow down and to allow myself to let go of my guilt and the false pretense of parenting that I've subjected myself to.   Making time for myself and my children should be my first priority; it's the best thing I can do for my kids.