Counting the Wins and Losses

 

If there’s one thing about parenting that I feel I’ve reached expert level on, it’s riding the emotional roller coaster that is all the momma feelings. After a good long run with good sleep, the past five days or so has found us back in a place of a middle of the night to early morning wake up and my go to response has just been to bring our son into bed to snuggle with us. That will leave you feeling really annoyed really quickly, until your kid looks at you and smiles saying “smoochies!!” as he gives you kisses before snuggling up and settling back into sleep for a bit and then I feel bad for ever being annoyed. 🙂

So in celebration of experiencing those moments of bouncing back and forth between the feelings of I’ve got this to questioning the quality of your parenting, I present to you my most recent parenting wins and losses:

My kid spent the afternoon only wanting to snuggle with me, needing to touching me pretty much at all times! Except for when I tried to get this picture, then I had to give him a bear hug to keep him from running away…

Felt like a champ when my kid begged all week to go to the library of all places and every day I told him we couldn’t go, even on a day my husband and I took off work meaning we actually could’ve. We just had plans for him to still go to daycare so that we could go see a movie and then watch basketball all afternoon (still reminding myself that he’s rather run around with friends all day and that mom’s and dads deserve alone time every once in awhile!)…

But then took him to the library over the weekend and we got to have a great time. Such a great time that I had to bribe him with the promise of french fries to get him to cooperate when we needed to leave…

Enthusiastically agreed with my husband for the last several months that yes, swim lessons would be a great activity to sign our son up for and we should definitely do that – it’ll be so good for him! And then keep letting it fall to the bottom of the priority list to call places, mostly because I’m a procrastinator extraordinaire but also because a part of me knows I’d have to get in the pool too and the thought of being in a swim suit makes me cringe (the hunt for high waisted swim bottoms is on!)…

Was really proud of myself for managing to have a guilt free girls afternoon while my husband stayed home with the kiddo (this has been so hard for me for the longest time!), only to feel the guilt sneak in a bit when I found myself telling my crying, clingy toddler the next morning that “it’s ok, you’re just staying home with grandma and grandpa while mommy and daddy run to the store real quick, I’m not leaving you all afternoon like I did yesterday”…

Loving that our son clearly now has two best little buddies at daycare judging from the amount he talks about them at home and seeing how they interact at drop off/pick up, but then choosing to not be the bearer of bad news when we learned that one of them recently had their last day attending our daycare…