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Free Yourself from all the Christmas Expectations this Year
Do you need to free yourself from all the Christmas expectations this year? Are you starting to feel like December slides into January in a miserable haze of rushing around and the “not enough” voices echoing in your head? Where does all this pressure come from? Often times, we invite it in! We scan Pinterest for ideas, but end up feeling like our homes are less than. We watch holiday movies with perfect homes and magical decor. And we compare with our friends and family, especially over social media. We end up feeling driven to create the perfect, spectacularly magical Christmas, and bind ourselves to unreasonable Christmas expectations. (Heaven not…
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Are your Expectations Ruining your Life?
Expectations are sneaky buggers. They are often so engrained into our ideas of normal that we forget we have them at all. We have all these cultural expectations that we don’t even question. For example, think about the 4th of July. Most Americans immediately picture patriotic picnics and hotdogs on the grill. If our day looks different, we can feel a little let down. And when these ingrained expectations aren’t met, we can experience real costs in our lives. I sometimes don’t even realize I had expectations until I find myself disappointed. And then I’m upset, angry, sad, etc. because I set myself up for failure. My expectations were ruining…
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Bad Mommy?
Are you a bad mommy? We’ve all had those moments; the week of crabby behavior gets explained by an ear infection we didn’t know the baby had. We feel terrible. How didn’t I know? We spent the entire week being frustrated, and we wonder if CPS is coming to take our children away because we stink at this mommy business. Somehow that one moment confirms what we’ve secretly felt all along, “I’m a bad mommy.” We hold up Facebook posts, Parents articles and measure ourselves, falling woefully short. Yep, not perfect, not even close. We don’t measure up to the slew of moms in our circles. What about that mom…
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It isn’t the rule that matters
Today, my daughter needed to tell me something while I was in the bathroom. We’ve instituted a rule that if the door to the bathroom is closed, she is to knock before entering and/or wait, unless she has an emergency or something is really important. She’s four, so we give her some latitude with what she considers important (i.e. her brother holding a toad in the living room), but today she by-passed three closed doors to get to me. Opening all of them without knocking. So far she has only done this with me, but the rule is partially in place to avoid her walking in on her father or…
