This is 38.

I’m still learning how to balance safety with experimentation as a parent…for example, helping our four-year old be involved with helping make food for meals and learn concepts such as “hot” while making tofu, and learning how to handle joking about things like when he talks about wanting to dump hot food all over someone’s head when he gets upset at them. Not something he actually does, and honestly it’s pretty funny, but also figuring out contextually the right notes to strike when, and how to just enjoy these conversations and dynamics sometimes without turning them into something “educational.” I’m still working on that. In the meantime, I am loving conversing with our kids, four and seven.

I feel like I try hard, really hard, to be patient and balance work, teaching, homeschooling, house management, and…parenting…in a healthy way. But I feel like my successes are quiet, no ripple happenings and my…failures or mistakes or less-patient responses to children are…the ones that get remembered, or feel like they do. Things like encouraging and enabling and providing gateways for their creativity and play and imagination and constant outdoor discovery…but then there are times where I need kids to stay clean and not dirty…and maybe it’s just a self-diagnosed feeling, but I feel more defined and judged by those. The latter. Like: I’m okay with you getting filthy dirty 6.5 days out of the week, ninety-five percent of the time. But this time, this one time, right now, I need you stay out of the dirt because we have to leave in thirty minutes and I have forty-five minutes of work to do first. And then that’s when they most want to…get filthy. I will laugh someday. I guess I just want to know our kids will too. Laugh. In the best way, and not remember all my impatience. Because I know I remember.

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