Proactive Parenting

Life moves fast.  I'm not just talking about summer (per my previous post), but in general.  The days are long but the years are short, as they say, but lately I almost feel like the days are getting shorter, too.  Yes, my work day tends to drag a bit, but as a whole, the weeks are really just flying by right now.  Again, that may just be summer messing with me, but lately I have been shocked at how quickly things are going, to the point that I get to Friday and I'm like, "Wait a second, I had way more to accomplish this week...I need another day!"

The problem I feel like we're running into right now is that we're so busy, so tired, and so intent on just getting through the days and weeks (and all of their assorted "stuff") that there's some sub-par parenting going on.  Not in an entirely bad way, I guess, but it's just not as intentional as I'd like it to be.  There just isn't the time or the brain space to do it the way it should be done, and I feel terrible about it.  If one of us was home with the kids all day, I'm sure our standards would go down in the summer no matter what.  I think that's just human nature and survival, honestly!  But when you're only home with your kids for an hour in the morning and a few hours at night, ideally you want to make the most of it.  But it's just not happening.  Case in point:

• All of my good intentions to keep Carter reading and writing this summer have pretty much fallen by the wayside.  I have tried to get him to read at bedtime periodically, and honestly he's not doing too bad.  But he hasn't been writing much more than his name, so now I'm concerned he'll be behind when he gets to first grade.

• Jacob is still lagging on finishing up his first summer reading book assignment, and I have no idea how we're going to get him to buckle down and do the writing part because clearly writing isn't his strength.  One book will be a challenge, let alone book #2.  Electronics may have to be pulled, but that battle might only make him more obstinate, so we need to be careful.

• Jacob had a ragey couple minutes on Wednesday night because we came home to Craig and Carter watching TV.  That's been a pretty common occurrence this summer, and Jacob is so frustrated because no one wants to go out and play basketball with him.  Our neighborhood sucks for kids his age, honestly, which I feel terrible about, but that puts pressure on the people in our house to keep him company.  In previous summers, the time when I was making dinner was usually outside time, and it just hasn't been lately.  Yes, that generally falls on Craig, and I know he's tired (not just from work but because he's usually working out in the evenings lately), but it's really been bothering Jacob a lot lately.  I'll admit I'm not helping much either, because my evening tasks of cooking and cleaning up are usually enough to make me not want to do anything else once I'm finally done.  Plus we've had more sports than usual this summer, and when we don't have sports there's often an errand to run, so it's easy to run out of time in the evenings before the sun goes down.  

• I really wanted to teach Carter how to ride a bike this summer.  His little bike has the training wheels off and I've had him ride it with me holding on, but we haven't done that nearly enough.  We totally missed the boat with Jacob on this, and Carter is actually getting on the older side now (oops) so I feel like we need to make it a priority.  But when electronics are offered up to him first (or not expressly banned), it's very hard to get him out there and I'm just tired of being the primary one calling him out on it.  He will play outside or inside with toys just fine when there are no other options, but apparently we need to be the ones to motivate him to do so by eliminating other options entirely.

• Bedtime is a mess...for everyone.  Carter doesn't want to get ready for bed when he's told, usually because he's watching a show or playing a game.  I'm usually still recovering from dinner or one of us is working out, so it often takes a bit for one of us to get to the point of getting up ourselves and forcing him upstairs.  We get him ready for bed, and usually one of us ends up falling asleep while laying with him, which minimizes our alone time together and kills the evening for whoever falls asleep.  In the meantime, Jacob wanders upstairs and whoever is still awake is either dozing off themselves or engrossed in something enough to lose track of Jacob.  By the time one of us realizes he's still awake at 10pm, either on his phone or doing a bit of his reading, we're yelling at him to go to bed.  He always takes a while to fall asleep, which means he's often up past 10:30.  Not good.  In the meantime, between the kid struggles and whatever "me time" we try to sneak into the evening, neither of us gets to bed at a reasonable time.  Those darn episodes of "Friends" on Nickelodeon just lull you into complacency every time.  So suddenly it's nearly midnight and I know it will be a rough morning and a rougher workday, which probably also means a rougher evening, too...which just sets us up for failure all over again.

I won't lie--sometimes I feel like I'm fighting these battles solo.  Maybe that's just because I feel like I notice them more and therefore I feel the pressure to resolve them because I'm the one bothered by them.  But parenthood should be a team effort, so at the risk of sounding naggy or accusatory, I probably need to get Craig on board to create a united front.  Why haven't I already?  Well... a) The bedtime issue above usually means we don't have much time to talk, at least not before one of us is exhausted; and b) Sometimes I blog here just to talk this stuff through in my own head to see if venting alone can fix it, or if I can make more sense of it myself before dragging someone else into it.  Clearly if I'm writing about it, it's bothering me enough to take action. 

While I would like more support on these issues, clearly it's not really cropping up on my priority list as much as it should be either, so I have to accept a good chunk of the blame.  We're all just busy and tired in the evenings and most of the time it feels like a gargantuan effort.  And to be fair, Craig was gone for five days and he's had a lot of work-related stuff in the last month or so, so it's probably less visible to him than me anyway.  With his schedule, our sports schedules, and evening errands combined, it's been hard to get in a groove and try to establish any sort of standards.  It's stuff like this that makes parents grateful when school starts and routines fall back into place.  Summer just feels a bit like mayhem, even though our actual schedules aren't that different from the school year.  Everything just feels more casual, I guess, and it disintegrates into chaos if you're not careful. 

At this point in the summer it seems like it's too late to start handing down new rules and regulations, but then again, we will need to get ourselves on track for the fall so maybe starting to right the ship at this stage wouldn't be a bad idea.   But both of us need to be on board and we can't get lazy.  We need to try to get back ahead of the chaos and be proactive about getting the kids on track.  We have to anticipate challenges and find ways to avoid them if we can.  I don't want to be the only one anticipating, though!  I explained some of my frustrations to Craig the other night and he's making efforts in some areas.  I sat down to build magnetic tiles with Carter yesterday, and we had fun at the playground in the afternoon while Jacob was at basketball tryouts.  Speaking of basketball, I have a whole lot of catching up to do in that area--we've had some developments!  But in the meantime, we have a little less than a month left to get all of this figured out before everything changes all over again!  Wish us luck!