Lately I've been noticing in my parenting that I seem to have some trouble noticing the forest for the trees, so to speak. I am infinitely blessed to be able to stay home with my kids, and they are healthy, sweet, happy, smart and, most of the time, generally well-behaved. Yet I keep getting stuck on the little things, the whining and the testing tantrums and the "But whyyyyyyyyyyyyy can't I have a cookie for breakfast???? But I WAAAAAAAAAANT one! AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaa!" and letting it ruin my whole day.
This evening at dinner the kids and I chatted and had a generally good time eating our frozen pizza. The four-year-old is a big fan of Olivia the pig from the books by Ian Falconer, tv show, etc. She loves it all. Really I do too. My favorite is the episode where Olivia decides she wants to be a mommy, names her baby brother, pets, and anything she can lay hands on Olivia 2, Olivia 3, etc all the way on up in her dream sequence through Little Olivia 37. Whenever the show is on I think the writers must be sneaking into my house and snatching material, so similar are my daughter and that sweet, precocious pig.
Anyway, my kids both got Olivia stuffed animals as stocking stuffers. My daughter got regular Olivia in her everyday dress, my son Olivia in green and yellow pajamas so I could pass him off as Ian, Olivia's kid brother, and thus avoid a freak-out about the baby "having a GIRL toy" perish the thought. My daughter thought it would be great fun, as the eating was winding down and she'd been excused, to take the pigs and fling them into the air. First she threw them just up in the air, sort of near our family room ceiling fan. I thought to myself that it was a fairly high fan, being on a vaulted ceiling, and there's no way she'd get the pig that high.
The next thing I knew, Olivia was being shot like a cannon towards the fireplace and hit it with surprising force about an inch from the flat-screen tv.
By that point in the day I was just too worn out for a big "Not something we do, expensive television, blah blah blah" lecture so I just made her move into the kitchen while I finished feeding her brother. A badminton racquet was brought into play. And she started laughing, and her brother started laughing. And laughing and laughing, it was great. They'd both be silent while she set up, she'd whack Olivia or Olivia towards the ceiling, and they'd just chortle with hysterical glee. It was awesome. It was the kind of moment you want to just savor, hold onto for when they're teenagers and dying their hair and hating you for existing and such. And I had this moment of clarity, that we actually have a lot of those moments, but for one reason or another, I tend to pass them by and focus on the negative. So this blog, which will hopefully be updated if not daily several times a week, will serve to remind me that there are great moments with the frustrating ones, that for every mini tantrum about needing help peeing or someone breathing on someone else, there are moments of unbridled sibling glee, and tiny stuff pigs flying joyfully through the air.
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