A Day of Practicality!!

Okay, those of you who know me know that practicality is not my strong suit!!  But...I occasionally come up with a good idea that is also practical!!

We are on the cusp of a graduation ceremony and party for our oldest daughter and my lack of practicality is coming back to bite me in the tushy!!

Big plans....but no way to carry them out.  Yuppers, story of my life!

Anyway to remind myself that I do come up with an idea that is capable of being carried out, I will share some of them with you!!  (Okay, some of these might not be TOTALLY my ideas, but I have no idea where I got them from!!)

*  Let your children work out their issues with their siblings without your involvement.  Now, before you go thinking we just let the girls duke it out in the boxing ring, we do have certain parameters that if crossed, we will intervene.  But for the most part, we stay out of it.

*  Mom is not a short order cook!  I will not cook-to-order our meals.  We have a daughter that is a vegetarian.  When we have hotdogs, raw veggies and baked beans, she has invented the bean dog! 

She will take a bun, fill it with beans, add a little mustard and Wahlah!!  She has a bean dog!!  Put that with some of the raw veggies and she has a meal.  Not one single child has distributed signs of starvation and in fact, they now will try almost anything and enjoy a wide variety of foods!!

*  Chores!!  Don't shy away from sharing chores with your children.  When they were young, I explained that they were learning how to be wives and mommies by my teaching them how to run a household.  As they got older, chores were a tangible way to show them that they were needed in our home and that we all had to work together to make things run.

*  Colors.  What??!  Colors!!  When the girls were young we assigned them each a color in order to keep toothbrushes, hairbrushes, towels, etc. separate.  I must give credit for this one to a sweet lady that I went to church with who had 12 children!

*  Teaching them how to choose appropriate things to watch and listen to.  Now this is a whole other blog post that I am working on for next week. The gist of it is that we teach our children when they are young how to guard their hearts and why they should, so that when they are teenagers, they can regulate themselves.

*  A time to sleep and a time to rise and most of the time, the time to rise is earlier than they might like!!  The girls have always had a bedtime and wake up time that we try very hard to adhere to.  My oldest has told me that this is one of the skills learned that she is most thankful for.

*  Travel as much as you can.  We can't hop across the ocean and tour Europe (though we certainly would love to!), but we have found other ways to travel and see the world.  For us, this has been camping in state parks, flying to NYC, taking a family trip to Alaska, going to Oklahoma City, and so forth.  Just go!!  Traveling pulls your children out of their comfort zone and it allows them to see that a world exists outside of what they see every day. 

 
*  If you don't want to share it, don't keep it out!  This was our rule when the girls were young and struggled with sharing their toys.  We did not make them share everything as most of us have items that are special to us.  But if they did not want to share it, they had to put it up when friends came over.  If it was out, it had to be shared!!

Well, I feel better now and more able to go and conquer the world of high school graduation celebrations!! 
 
I probably am not going to blog anything else this week so that I can concentrate on getting ready for our get-together, but I will let you know how it all goes next week!!
 
See y'all then!!