Day 141 - All I Can Be

Here's a photo taken on Christmas Eve. My three children among a group of my friends' children.

We made a fabulous memory that night! Spending time with wonderful friends, potluck dinner, and making reindeer food for the children. They've been doing it for years...now they do it just because they love the tradition of doing it. :)

I wish I could work less and make more of our own memories and traditions with my children. I find that I am so tired and exhausted when I get home from working all day that all I do is cook dinner, do dishes, and then crash into bed. Five days a week, the same ol' routine.

Weekends come around and it's house cleaning, more dishes, laundry, errands. Not much time for making memories.

We do enjoy the back yard during the summer time, though. Sitting in our lawn chairs in the hot summer evenings while the children play outdoors, tending to our garden and flower beds, riding bikes occasionally around town, walking downtown to local coffee shops and toys shops.

Winter time, we're stuck indoors playing board games and watching family movies.

Despite all I do, my children can guilt me into feeling I'm not doing enough.

"Mommy, you never cuddled me today!" Cries my middle child, despite the fact that I've played board games and/or sat on the couch next to her and watched a family DVD.

"Mom, you aren't any fun like my other friends' parents. All you do is clean and nap and read books," shouts my eldest. Well, her friends' parents aren't working FT and raising three children -- one of whom is 2 years old!

My children can at times back talk me, as well. Or they speak to me disrespectfully.

It's exasperating sometimes. And then I get upset with them, send them to their rooms, and they act as if I'm the worst mother in the world.

Well, I"d like to see them live the life of a poor African child whose father has died of AIDS and whose mother is ill herself and can't work to find food, so they are wandering the streets searching dumpsters for their daily food.

But all my children see is their discontentment. "What have you done for me LATELY?" seems to be their mantra.

So one area I'd like the Lord to help me in is my parenting skills. Either the Lord will show me how to be firmer with my children, now allowing them to guilt-trip me...or He will show me how to improve to better meet their needs.

Father, you have blessed me with three beautiful girls, and I want to do my best. I realize that when they're older, they will have issues with how I parented, despite how hard I tried...but I pray that I would be good to them, loving and kind and tender and gentle and the type of mother You have called me to be. Amen.