Parenting.....an exercise in humility

I have a special song for each of my kids. Gavin has always liked the 14 Angels song. Brendan always requested Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Ashlynn preferred my own tune made up to the words from a book "I like you for always, I love you forever, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be" and Caitrin has always loved My Darling Irish Girl. Meghan is 3 months shy of being two and has not liked me singing ANY song, let alone have a favorite one. I would not be honest if I said it hasn't bothered me, because I really enjoy singing and I'm known around my home for making up little songs for routine tasks/chores that I am sure will play in my kids heads when they are older. I'm not sure if they will laugh or cringe when it happens the first time they walk in the door of their own homes and hear the original tune I sing to "shoes on the shoe rack....coats in the closet." And one day, I hope they find themselves singing to their children as they push them on the swing, "I like to fly....up in the sky....I go up and down, and back and forth, swinging through the air, without a care as I fly.....up in the sky." Yes, I like to sing and find it a natural way to guide my kids and have fun with them. Sooo....when my yongest has cried, screamed and whined at me from very early on if/whenever I started to sing any song to her, I have found it rather disconcerting. It has gotten easier with time, but still upsetting and a disappointment until recently. With Meghan's quickly developing language skills, I figured out that she was the one who wanted to do the singing. She didn't want anyone singing a song that she wasn't able to sing along to. Since she can talk better, she can now sing too. She likes listening to recordings of people singing, videos, tv shows and such with people singing and learns from them without any protest. So I persisted in offering/asking her if she wanted me to sing her a song or would like to sing together (ABC's, Twinkle Twinkle, etc.). Last night, it finally happened! Meghan let me sing to her at bedtime. She wanted to hear "Rock-a-bye Meghan, in a tree top. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Mommy will catch Meghan cradle and all." Had to change the lyrics a long time ago as I always thought it was a scary song and not likely to lull a child to sleep when they finally comprehend the lyrics! Ha ha! So there is was...a first. Hopefully she will allow it to continue and her favorite song request will not be the song she has been singing around the house the last couple of days, which is, "S.O.S. please someone help me" (from the Chipmunks 3 movie, where Jeanette is held captive, tied to a string and lowered down to gather a treasure while singing that song). Ha ha!

Victory Day 2012 - An exercise in explaining atrocities to children

I don't know about others, but I find it difficult explaining historic atrocities. Victory Day in Russia is a celebration of their victory over the Nazi invasion of their country...which cost them 28,000,000 lives. In order to explain the significance of the victory, it was time to explain what the Nazi movement was. No matter how you simplify the message, there is no preserving their innocence while informing them of the lives lost due to hatred.  So I turned to the internet as a guide for explaining things from a perspective of a child, how the Nazi movement affected children back then. While it was informative and helped my children to gain some perspective on what children and their families endured, it was awful to be the bearer of such awful news. I have always been very protective over the things my children see on tv, especially the news, which is filled with violence and depressing details of poor choices made by people in the world (sometimes closer to home than I would like them to be aware of). I was spared knowledge of those things as a child and enjoyed the innocence of it...allowing me to be a child. A time was going to come in the future where knowledge of those things would come. I treasure my childhood and hoped to do the same for my children. However, I have found it to be much harder to protect them from those things these days. Media is so much more prevalent than when I was a child. So the dilemma presented itself - hear it from me now, or wait until the discover it on their own and hope that they will ask questions about it. After prayerful consideration, I opted for letting them hear it from me first, so that they can hear it as delicately as possible with some perspective on why it is important to learn from past mistakes so things like that don't happen again. There is always a moral lesson to be learned from it and I choose to focus on that instead of the mistake that led to such atrocities. The more we talked about it, as they empathized with the victims and were enraged by the awful things done, I found it easier to explore ideas about how we can make choices every day that can lead our world in a direction that will not repeat those mistakes. And the choice we can make was very simple...to love instead of hate. Kids have a wonderful way of seeing things very clearly. Hate brings about bad things. Love brings about good things. I am sure that we will have more 'learning opportunies' in the coming future and this foundation will prove to be a good one.