A not-so-perfect "Mormon" mom

I don’t like to give advice, but here’s one that every new parent should take into consideration – especially if you want things to be clean.   Don’t use wood furniture!   Seriously. It is really hard to keep clean and kids are really messy and really hard on furniture. Mostly, I’m talking about dining room furniture, because that’s where most of the messes happen. We’ve had a large wood table for 12-15 years. It’s become an embarrassment. The top gets a lot of use, right? So, it’s scratched, dented, stained, rubbed down, and anything else that can happen to a wood table top. The leaf looks good because we didn’t always have enough room in our dining room to have the leaf in all the time (which we do now). So, the entire table looks even worse because the middle section is nice, which makes the rest of the table obviously un-nice (if that’s even a word). And don’t think that just because your kids are older, you can finally get a wood dining set. My 1...

Adoption is not a requirement for sainthood. While I know that’s an odd thing to say, believe it or not, one of our neighbors told me often what a saint I was for what I was "doing for these kids", etc. Seriously? Parenting is parenting, regardless of where the child started out in life. Parenting is hard. It brings out the best and the worst in those who choose it. When my kids were little, I was not in a happy place and it was really hard for me to truly love them. Why did I keep adopting? Because I was guided and directed to do so. Someday I might look back and see the blessings and the good things from parenting, but right now I see other things. I can only hope that my children can forgive me for being so harsh when they were so little and innocent. Not to make an excuse, but I had no clue what I was doing and I didn’t get the opportunity to love the child while it was growing in the womb or experience the excruciating pain and then the exhilaration of...

In the LDS community it seems there are some things people don’t really want to talk about or are embarrassed by or don’t voice their opinion of because of guilt or the fear of being judged. I was there. I get it. Honestly, I think that going through my husband’s cancer treatments helped open my eyes and realize that it just doesn’t matter what other people think or say, but it’s their problem and not yours. I know that’s a weird lesson to learn from a trial, but I remember one day when we were at a grocery store and I was doing all the lifting and shopping and he was in a driving cart and I just wondered if other people were wondering why he wasn’t doing anything at all to help me or why someone who appears to be healthy was in a driving cart. And it dawned on me that it doesn’t matter AT ALL what they think. I knew why he couldn’t help me and why he needed that cart. Wow, that was completely a side note.           ...

In my weird mind, I am actually thinking about the desire to be a grandparent. Mostly it’s been, “I’m not old enough”, but I guess I finally accepted the fact that I’m getting older, along with everyone else in the world, and I’ll just have to deal with it. Right now there isn’t much hope or expectation for my son to even go on a date, let alone get married and have children. But my daughter is graduating high school and leaving us for several months before she goes on her mission for 18 months and there is a real possibility for grandchildren within the next five years. I think I’m actually looking forward to that. I hope I have the opportunity to spoil and visit my grandchildren as often as possible. I’ve lived away from my parents for all of my parenting years, so my kids didn’t get spoiled. (Not that they would, but there was hope.) My daughters and I were in a store one day looking for training bras for my youngest, and we went too far and ended up in the baby s...

I sat at work one day, one particularly slow day, and wrote an email to myself about various things I wanted to put on this blog. I'm not sure I'll put all of it in one, or spread it out, but 'so it begins'.... It might not be a good idea to try to "help" a parent with a screaming toddler.....   Parents, don’t worry so much about your baby or toddler making noise or being disruptive (or what you perceive to be disruptive). Don’t be embarrassed by what they say or do when they are younger and really don’t understand what they are saying or doing. This is what you are there for – to let them know what is and is not acceptable in certain places or at certain times. Their noise probably bothers you more than it bothers anyone else. Except...... It was after one in the afternoon. My two youngest were about 3 years old or so. We hadn’t had lunch. We were exhausted. We were in a grocery store (ya, I don’t know why either). My daughter was in the ca...