ohbloodyhell8

and a life long quest.  Why do grown-ups forget to have patience with children?  More specifically, why do I forget to have patience with my sons?  Good grief, they are great boys.  I forget they are only boys…six and (a week shy of) eight years old.  They need time to process, formulate their ideas, and then share them.  I wish I were a supermom who always had patience, but I’m not.  I have moments when I don’t remember they’re only children and move through the moment or experience too quickly.   These experiences are often the annoying day-to-day activities, like running errands or working through the chore list, but they are still experiences that the boys can learn from.  What lessons do I want them to learn?

I want them to learn that chores are a good thing.  Chores help teach about work-ethic, the need to contribute to a household, church, classroom, or community and the importance of everyone who uses a space contributing to it.  I want to teach this without also teaching the very easy art of complaining, but I fail there too.

I want them to learn that some days we have to do things that aren’t fun, but we need to do those things before we can necessarily get to the fun stuff.  This is one part of the job of being mom I’d love to blow off.  I spend 50 of my waking hours at work.  That doesn’t leave a lot of waking hours to spend with my family.  I’d rather do the fun stuff with them than the boring errand type things.  How do I add more time to the day?  Jim Croce sang about this desire.  Oh, if I could put time in a bottle.  I try to apply the idea of epochal time to my waking non-work time, but it seems as though I’m better at epochal time at work and fungible time at home.  Staying up late to complete tedious chores only works so much.  I could have a spine and follow through on my plans of having the boys help me with the tedious chores, thus killing several birds with one stone. 

I did manage it today, sort of.  After mowing the section of the yard that I couldn’t get to before the rain, we weeded for a while together.  My sons are not used to work.  They were complaining, taking breaks, and avoiding work as much as possible.  We did get a decent amount of weeding done (the really tall ones along my curb are practically gone).  We had fun shouting about the heat (“It’s hot!…Did I mention it’s hot?” followed by our giggles).  They had to put  away toys tonight too, but again it was accompanied with whines and attempts to get out of it.  That all relates back to my lacking a spine (ironic, considering I’m married to the world’s greatest chiropractor). 

Each day I get a little better.  Each day I can have a little more patience, accomplish the tasks I need to do, and celebrate the epochal moments of life.  Well, I can try at least.