Late Bloomer

Most of my friends had babies about 20 years ago. I had babies starting 5 years ago and my whole world was really changed so much because I thought that I was aware of what parenting is. Since I had seen my friends do it I thought I knew what babies need and since ai helped with my siblings , how to take care of them. I realized, however when I had my first baby...that I had no idea what I was doing. I realize that my friends have been in this different world than I was for so long and I had no idea what they were going through really at all. We of course all have our different ways of looking at parenting, our different expectations for ourselves and for our children and for the world we create for them. One of the most important lessons that I'm learning about parenting is the way that we view our children and our situation is very important. I suppose this is obvious but I'm still trying to figure out how to get the right attitude about it. I guess it's really not that obvious. I realize that when I'm looking at my children as a job or a task it definitely makes it harder when I victimize my situation for example just a night where you are unable to sleep because you're almost 3-year-old is also unable to sleep and she just wants you to lay next to her while she's sings or talks or kicks you can be very irritating ...especially if you're trying to keep her from waking other people up who might also need to be put back to sleep. Also it is very hard when you are very tired all the time and you really want her to go to sleep and she will not. Especially if you had a small burst of a couple of nights of her sleeping through the night for the first time in 3 years! It makes it a bit frustrating and makes you wonder what did I do wrong yesterday or last night that she's not sleeping tonight and who knows it could be any number of things or zero number of things but the point is she needs you and you just need to be okay with it and look at it with the right attitude. Everyones opinions of what to do in this situation obviously are different. Some say it is so important to teach your children to sleep on their own , to self soothe and whatnot. Which I don't disagree with completely, but I also don't fully agree. The important thing , I believe, is to decide what is important to you most, and instead of being frustrated that you can't sleep and worried that you're not going to get to sleep , its much better to focus on just cuddling your babies and enjoying the time that you have with them because they're not going to be that little forever and they're not going to want you to cuddle them forever. I keep trying to remind myself this and I think about how my friends are already past that stage they don't get to cuddle their babies anymore. Something that blew my mind recently was the realization that my time is not my own, but it ia a gift from God. That realization is very helpful to me.

The term preemptive nostalgia is very interesting to me. I have had such a hard time striking the balance between being productive and "enjoying" my kids' youth. However , I am doing my best to try to turn that around. Sometimes, or actually a lot of times, I will go to bed feeling regretful I didn't do this or that with them today. Instead of focusing on what I did get done and the things I did get to do with them , I'm focusing on the times that I got frustrated with them, the times they asked me to do something with them that I didn't have time to do or chose not to do. So that's something I'm trying to learn is how to focus on deciding what is the best use of my time with them, because obviously I can't always play with them but at the same time I don't want to miss connecting. Sometimes I want to try to be everything to my kids and I realize that I can't, that a lot of times I need to turn to God and he will be able to fill in the blanks where I am unable to.

Something I heard in church the other day or maybe it's on a video I don't really remember but the point is it's stuck with me and I remember it said you shouldn't pray to God that he takes your struggle away, you should pray for him to make you strong in the moment to handle the struggle. So that's been part of my "parenting prayer" lately. I started out recently trying to do parent prayers at least once a day. Now I do them at least all day long ...if possible! Pray without ceasing is literally you don't really understand what that means I guess until you're a parent but now I know and I thought at first that I'd be fine with just praying you know one Prayer a day like oh maybe if I just do my parent prayer in the morning I'll be able to handle the day and handle the kids and not get frustrated but now it's like a continual thing that I need to do as often as possible and sometimes pray with my kids. For example the other day I got frustrated about something and finally ended up apologizing to my five-year-old and I said you know what let's pray together. We prayed about it, talked about it and that made me feel better that I was teaching him how to try to deal with situations that are hard by turning to God in prayer. The point is God does want us to rely on him and turn to him for guidance and not necessarily have our struggles taken away but pray continually for strength to handle the struggles and I definitely wouldn't say that I've mastered that but I am getting better slowly but surely. I am definitely grateful to be a late bloomer in terms of having my children at an older age , and hopeful I can be more mature now than I would have been if I had babies earlier.