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Saturday, October 03, 2009

Parental Compromise

Do you make compromising split second decisions with your children? I'm sure you do, in fact we all make these decisions all day long and it affects our daily outcome. I'm constantly testing the boundaries with my daughter. Will she tolerate one more store? Will she behave during a 45 minute car ride? Will she play with the animals long enough to let me hastily write this post?

This morning I decided this little face had way too much energy to spend the morning at home


Dare I publicly admit I'm slightly tired of going to the beach every weekend? There I said it! Today we are going back to Deerfield Beach Island, she is now walking and it will be a new fun experience for her (last time I carried her for the entire 45 minute trail walk and it was a bit taxing). This decision was determined at 8:45am, knowing the boat leaves the top of the hour, we had until 9:30 to walk the dog, pack bags, fill water bottles, change out of pajamas and finish tea. It should have been easy to do all this in 45 minutes but I found us running late after I spent too much time moseying through blogs - I have no one to blame but myself.

I frantically rushed packing bread, milk bottle with ice pack in a nice little food pack for baby. Dropped it briefly to gather other bags + baby and rush to the car, we have 25 minutes to go and it's a 25 minute drive with cooperative traffic. I'm doing this, we have to at least TRY! About half way there I realize the food was left where I dropped it, or did I leave it on the car roof? Compromise moment - do I turnaround and miss the 10am boat ride? Do I have enough time to stop at Starbucks and get milk and coffee, that would be nice but no I have exactly enough time to get there and the lights are cooperating. Besides, once she sees the trails, dirt and pine cones she will refuse to eat regardless of what goodies I have in tow. We proceed, against my better judgment of her nutritional needs, and reach the boat just in time (even after I missed the turn and had to do a big U-turn - ACK!) And I'm so thankful that I never clean my car - there was a pair of shoes just waiting to go for a walk in the woods. What kind of mother leaves home without shoes? Thankfully I do not have to answer that one.

We didn't get very far on the trail, there were too many rocks, sticks, crunchy leaves, pine cones and pine needles to investigate.


It's really hard to get a smile or to get her to look at the camera once she's in full investigation mode, she's very serious about carbon cycle research.




The boat returns to mainland once an hour so 45 minutes into our fun I pick her up to walk back to the boat. She screamed bloody murder with kicking and flailing arms the entire 1 minute walk back to the boat. When I finally put her down she says to me "good girl". Yes, I'm a "good girl" for putting her down. So glad she's learning to put words into correct context.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a good day - even if it didn't go as planned.

I think we all just do tbe best we can as parents. (right? I hope I'm not the only one making it up as I go along.)

Suburban Turmoil said...

TIRED OF THE BEACH?! NOOOOOOO! ;D

I have a son doing many of the same things your daughter's doing now. Thank God I can look at my 5-year-old and know that this too shall pass. I can enjoy his shenanigans now (usually) because I know that they won't last forever.

And thanks for the e-mail. I haven't watched Glee yet, but I definitely saw the resemblance when I saw photos of that actress! Heck, anything's better than Tori Spelling, which is the comparison I usually get!

R. Molder said...

Tori Spelling??? That is really bizarre, I don't see the resemblance.