Help
With Your Rule
Frustration with Not-So-Perfect-Rule
Dear Holly,
I wrote to you a few months ago, as I was making the transition to having three children 3 and under! I took your beautiful advice, and things have been going fairly well. At least I have some basic things set up: my prayer time, morning chores, family prayer ... I still don't feel like our day has a very nice flow, which gets me frustrated. I want things to flow naturally, one after the other, but sometimes, things take a little longer to accomplish, or I have to feed the baby, and then I lose the other two children completely. At this point, "Can we watch ...?" often creeps in, and I don't have a very quick response. I don't mind them watching a video here and there, but I want to set the time, not them!
Labels: 4th P Parent, About a Rule of Life
posted by Holly at 7:59 PM
1 Comments:
First of all - this is GOOD that you have begun your rule! A wise priest friend of mine once said, "You can test the strength of what you are doing by the gradualness with which it is coming about." I think you need to look positively toward what you HAVE accomplished. The tortoise won the race one plodding little step at a time...
Nonetheless, I know the feeling of frustration. What mother doesn't? I have been revamping our nutrition and diet here and I have to tell you, after working on it for 2 months, I STILL don't feel like I have gotten very far! But, if the truth be told - I have done A LOT! It's just that I am impatient!
Hmmm. Sounds like you! heh heh :-)
I know you want a smooth flow - good. Then just put yourself in assessment mode and start to look at things ... So, if it takes you a little longer to accomplish a 'routine' task... then add 10 minutes or whatever to your scheduled time to accomodate that. On 'good days' you will have extra free time, but on 'bad days' you will still have plenty of time to accomplish the necessities.
Ask yourself "What is working? What is not working?" Why? How can I Work around this?"
As for 'losing the others' when you have to feed the baby or you have to change something - this is no problem. You need to have a little list of things your children can do without you which you can 'send' them off to do when you need to. It should be a special list - reserved just for these times... and even with special toys...
The TV can be a problem when the children decide how much or when to watch - True. So plan in advance if you can - especially any faith videos or
educational videos, so that when they DO watch, you know it is really good stuff. And I also think this reaction to put on the TV comes from not having a plan or a bank of ideas. I would strongly suggest you look on the Holly's Notebook page for "Activities for Little Ones" - probably posted back in Nov 2004 or so. It will give you an extreme list of ideas - decide which ones are supervised , semi-supervised and which ones can be done independently.
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