My boys are getting older and they are becoming more able to prepare their own foods. However, they still ask me to get them food. As a mom I have prepared food for them for almost thirteen years. I have prepared meals, arranged food on their plates, and placed it in front of them hundreds of times. Doing so has been part of my duty as a mom.................................. To keep reading my guest post on The Everyday Mom Life link is ... Continue Reading...
A Letter to my Mother in Heaven
Dear Mom, I miss you. I wish you were here. I can tell you a mom is irreplaceable for a child. When a mom dies, her child is no longer whole. The loss makes it hard to breathe. That child flails in the wind like a cottonwood seed. A piece of fluff that gets knocked about the world by the wind. Sometimes I landed on solid ground, sometimes I landed in a pond and almost drowned. But I’m still here. I survived. In the year after your death my dreams plagued me whether they were about your ... Continue Reading...
Five Ways to Teach Kindness to Kids
Kindness as a way of life is something I want to teach my three kids. The three of them fight; I mean they fight a lot. Of course they fight, they are siblings. But I also see kindness woven in between the fights like threads of shining hope that one day they will be kind adults. They are knit together as siblings like a mat of ever-changing interactions and some days I'm frustrated by more angry threads than kind threads. I let the kind threads shine through by highlighting them and ... Continue Reading...
I’m Living the Boys’ Life Disgusting Stories by Mom
In my house of dysfunctional bathroom use including poorly placed farts I get little boys’ hilarious burps, foam darts whizzing past my computer screen to the tune of heckling laughter, and all sorts of other things I dare not mention, but just wait and I will. I barely flinch. It’s no doubt I’m living the boys’ life with four males in the house: my husband and three sons aged 12 and under. I like to think of us as 4 Alans and an Ann as these are our middle names. Sorry boys, I ... Continue Reading...
My Worst Fear as a Mother
My kids always ask me what I’m scared of the most and I’m never really sure how to answer them because I don’t want to scare them by my real fear. I usually say I’m scared of something bad happening to them. I can’t tell them the real truth that what I’m really scared of is dying and leaving them to navigate growing up without me. It’s not that I don’t think my husband would do a good job, I know he would, but I saw how hard it was for my dad to be a widowed, grieving single parent and I know ... Continue Reading...
Paying Homage to the Kindergarten Teacher
This was originally published on Her View From Home. http://herviewfromhome.com/paying-homage-to-the-kindergarten-teacher/ My youngest is now in kindergarten and I am finally able to volunteer in the classroom. I am amazed how the teacher commands the room. Here is what I heard, and learned, while volunteering in my son’s kindergarten classroom: “But pink is my favorite!” The kids have opinions about everything they want. They want a certain color paper. They want to sit on a ... Continue Reading...
