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Kids grow up SO fast. (They really do. My son has just grown out of his socks overnight. Like, literally overnight. At least I think he did. It could be my laundry skills, or I might have mixed them up with his little brother’s again…)
But seriously, as they grow – so very quickly – I see my kids absorbing so much from the world around them.
They see how to react to the spill at breakfast, and how to handle the traffic on the way to school. They notice what food we eat and why, and they notice how I organize my time and our home. They notice how we spend our weekends, how my husband and I greet each other, how we respond to their complaints about their teachers, how we treat our friends, how we celebrate holidays, whether we interrupt when someone else is talking, how we remember something important. They notice.
As I notice them noticing me, I feel in my gut the things I am happy they are noticing. And the things I wish they wouldn’t.
And I know it’s time. It’s past time.
There are so many things that I am grateful I took away from my childhood. And there are things I wish I’d learned differently. Some of those things I’ve changed along the way. And some I still struggle with.
But now it’s my children’s childhood. And if I want them to have the benefit of what I’ve learned – or tried to learn – along the way, they need to see me being the kind of person I hope they will be. So very many lessons (and skills, and habits, and character traits) are much better learned as children when they become a natural part of our identities. Lessons learned in such tiny moments, we often don’t realize they are learning at all…
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At the very least it’s a good reason to finally, really try to fix more of the things that bother me about myself.
So Ordinary Influence is about engaging the power of everyday choices to shape our selves, our families and our world. I’ve created this blog to help add some direction and purpose back into the work I do as a parent every day, and I hope you can find something in it that resonates for you, too.
Life is shaped little by little – with ordinary but persistent daily choices that influence what ends up being who we are. And who our kids are.
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
ANNIE DILLARD
For a perfectionist like me, that sometimes feels overwhelming when I make a choice I regret later. Or simply when our everyday reality feels like a compromise: I still yell too often, scroll too much, use too much plastic.
I think, for many of us, that too often these little misses pile up into a big feeling of defeat at the end of the day, week, month, year…
But time is passing, and my kids are noticing. And I am starting to notice how it feels when they repeat words I’ve said in anger, or ask to scroll pictures on my phone instead of reading a book or drawing a picture. But I also notice how it feels when they remember on their own to get a towel for their spilled water, and when they are the first one on the sports field to offer a hand to the kid on the ground.
And I know which feelings I want more of. I know what kind of person I want to pave the way for them to be.
In writing here I am trying to put down some stepping stones in the fog of daily life. To lay out a path for making ordinary daily choices that influence, little by little, where, and who, our family will be once the fog has cleared.
Or at least I can say that I tried.