by Sarah Hughes | May 30, 2014 | 2014, Family, Kids, Maternal Health, Motherhood, Parenting, Sarah Hughes, USA, Working Mother, World Interviews, World Motherhood, Younger Children
Sarah Hughes has been helping out behind the scenes at World Moms Blog. Read her interview to learn more about our newest contributor in North America! (more…)
Sarah grew up in New York and now calls New Jersey home. A mother of two, Derek (5) and Hayley (2), Sarah spends her days working at a University and nights playing with her children. In her “free” time Sarah is a Shot@Life Champion and a volunteer walk coordinator for the Preeclampsia Foundation. Sarah enjoys reading, knitting, sewing, shopping and coffee. Visit Sarah at her own blog Finnegan and The Hughes, where she writes about parenting, kid friendly adventures and Social Good issues. Sarah is also an editor, here, at World Moms Blog!
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by Mirjam | May 26, 2014 | 2014, Awareness, Bedtime Routines, Being Thankful, Childhood, Discipline, Family, Girls, Kids, Life Balance, Milestones, Motherhood, Netherlands, Parenting, Sleep, Sleep and Children, World Motherhood, Younger Children
Long term goals versus short term goals.
(You have probably scrolled up and down to see if you’re at the right place. Yes you are. Continue to read.)
Short term goals are goals that you want to achieve instantaneously. There is immediate result and you benefit directly.
Long term goals are goals that you want to achieve in the future.
It will take you a while to achieve these goals and you have to be patient and persistent to achieve your goal.
Bear with me now…This is going to make sense, I promise.
Example. You are hungry.
Short term goal: I want to eat something.
Long term goal: I want to maintain my gorgeous figure. (ahem…Just go with me on this one…)
If you focus on your short term goal, anything will do: a snickers bar, ice cream, donuts, anything.
But if you bring in the long term goal, you will need to think about how you are going to achieve your long term goal, while keeping in mind your short term goal.
In other words:
how am I going to still my hunger without ruining my fantastic figure.
Got it? Simple, right?
So, why am I talking about goals?
Because they relate to parenting.
Parenting is a job where you constantly have to remember that it is about the long term goals.
But the present is so in our face, that sometimes we forget and go with the short term goals and eventually pay the price.
Example: You’re in the supermarket with your child.
Your child is tired cranky, difficult.
But you have to do this.
We all know that this is a scenario for a possible disaster.
And we all know how easy it is, to give the child some candy or a cookie and get the job done.
(I’ve done it, you’ve done it, I’m guessing we all have.)
But what is the long term goal here?
You want to be able to do your groceries in peace and quiet.
And possibly have a great time doing it, maybe even some skipping and singing.
Too far fetched? Okay, let’s back up..
How do you achieve that long term goal?
By NOT giving the candy.
By planning and repeating rules, by making sure your child is fed and well rested,
whenever you enter the supermarket.
By praising your child for good behavior,
by making sure you build up the amount of time you spend at the supermarket.
How do you achieve that long term goal?
By investing.
This is what I do all day, it is hard.
It requires an enormous amount of energy.
Sometimes I have to be patient, because I am somewhere in between the process of achieving my long term goal
and I just cannot see the end of it. Sometimes I’m tempted to go for the short term goal.
You want me to give your ten teddy bears, little blankets and little beds for the night?
And you want me to make sure they are all in the right bed with the right blanket,
and you change your mind about it every second? Sure kid. If I get to crash on the couch and you finally go to sleep after that.
Sure, I’ll do it.
But then I ask myself this question:
Do I really want to spend my evenings running around, taking care of dolls and teddy bears
and every other stuff that you seem to come up with just around bedtime?
Or do I want bedtime to be quiet and peaceful and efficient.
And I realize, that I want the latter.
So I take a deep breath, and choose the battle.
On my last nerves, desperate to choose the couch instead.
I explain to my hysterical screaming child that it is bedtime, not playing time.
She will lie down now and Mommy will go downstairs.
She screams, she cries, she stomps her feet. I go up and down the stairs four or five times.
She won’t calm down. I cuddle, but I don’t give in.
Finally she goes to sleep.
I throw myself on the couch, tired, discouraged.
Next night:
“Mommy I want the big bear and the little bear and my giraffe, and…”
“You can pick two stuffed animals and then you will go to sleep. It’s sleepy time, not playtime.”
She screams. I kiss and cuddle her and walk away.
Before I reach the couch it is quiet. Really quiet.
I sneak upstairs to see what she’s doing.
She’s fast asleep with three stuffed animals..
I am well on my way to reaching my long term goal.
Does any of this sound familiar? What are your long term (parenting) goals?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in The Netherlands, Mirjam.
The picture used in this post is credited to the author.
Mirjam was born in warm, sunny Surinam, but raised in the cold, rainy Netherlands.
She´s the mom of three rambunctious beauties and has been married for over two decades to the love of her life.
Every day she´s challenged by combining the best and worst of two cultures at home.
She used to be an elementary school teacher but is now a stay at home Mom. In her free time she loves to pick up her photo camera.
Mirjam has had a life long battle with depression and is not afraid to talk about it.
She enjoys being a blogger, an amateur photographer, and loves being creative in many ways.
But most of all she loves live and laughter, even though sometimes she is the joke herself.
You can find Mirjam (sporadically) at her blog Apples and Roses where she blogs about her battle with depression and finding beauty in the simplest of things. You can also find Mirjam on Twitter and Instagram.
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by Natalia Rankine-Galloway (Morocco) | May 23, 2014 | 2014, Awareness, Childhood, Communication, Girls, Kids, Life Lesson, Milestones, Motherhood, Parenting, USA, Womanhood, World Motherhood, Younger Children
Last month’s Atlantic Magazine featured a cover page story on the “Confidence Gap” between men and women. For a variety of reasons both biological and environmental, women drastically underestimate their own competence. This, the article tells us, is a big obstacle to women accomplishing the success they are due.
While it was interesting to me that womankind as a whole seems to value themselves more meanly than mankind, it was all the more interesting to know that I wasn’t alone in feeling anywhere from out of my depth to outright fraudulent in many situations. Apparently many other ladies in the room were likely feeling just the same.
But more than anything else, the article left me examining a gap within myself. The gap between where I feel my confidence ought to be and where is actually is. And where it is, quite frankly, is way….way behind. Let’s say…1994 behind. (more…)
Natalia was born a stone's throw from the Queen's racetrack in Ascot, UK and has been trying to get a ticket to the races and a fabulous hat to go with it ever since. She was born to a Peruvian mother and an Irish father who kept her on her toes, moving her to Spain, Ireland and back to the UK before settling her in New York for the length of middle and high school. She is still uncertain of what she did to deserve that.
She fled to Boston for college and then Washington, D.C. to marry her wonderful husband, who she met in her freshman year at college. As a military man, he was able to keep her in the migratory lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. Within 5 months of marriage, they were off to Japan where they stayed for a wonderful 2 and one half years before coming home to roost. Baby Xavier was born in New York in 2011 and has not slept since.
A joy and an inspiration, it was Xavier who moved Natalia to entrepreneurship and the launch of CultureBaby. She has loved forging her own path and is excited for the next step for her family and CultureBaby.
Natalia believes in the potential for peace that all children carry within them and the importance of raising them as global citizens. She loves language, history, art and culture as well as Vietnamese Pho, Argentinian Malbec, English winters, Spanish summers and Japanese department stores...and she still hopes one day to catch the number 9 race with Queen Liz.
You can find her personal blog, The Culture Mum Chronicles.
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by Roxanne (USA) | May 16, 2014 | 2014, Communication, Family, Inspirational, Life Lesson, Motherhood, Parenting, Rox is Brilliant, Single Mother, Unintentionally Brilliant, USA, Womanhood, Working Mother, World Motherhood
My extended family on my dad’s side is huge. My dad had a bunch of sisters and a brother, and they’ve all gotten married and had babies and all of their babies are getting married and having babies. My oldest cousin is in her 40s; the youngest is in her early 20s. The oldest of the cousin’s children is 17 and the youngest is…just a couple weeks old.
Growing up, one set of cousins lived particularly close to where we lived. J is almost exactly 10 years older than me, and his sister V is 8 years older. They both used to babysit my siblings and I, but I mostly just remember V. She would take us on the bus when we left the house. She was a cheerleader, and when I got a little older she was my cheer coach.
In all honesty, she was basically my big sister. I looked up to her in a way I wished my little sister would look up to me. I still do.
Recently I had a mini breakdown at a family event and I ended up closing myself in a bedroom for a while to have a good cry. I just needed to get it out to be done with it and move on. It was the only way I could deal with all of the emotions I had been feeling.
V came to me to talk. It was a little bit of a relief when she admitted to me that she doesn’t have everything together. She made me realize that it’s all right for me to not have it all together at 30. People have been telling me this, but V saying it–for some reason–really made it click. I have looked up to her for so much of my life, and what I could see always looked like she really knew what she was doing. For her to admit even the smallest imperfection meant a lot to me.
Not because I feel better that she’s imperfect, but because she made it okay for me to be imperfect. She made it okay for me, and I’m here to tell you that it’s okay for you. It’s okay if you don’t have it all together. Nobody does. We’re all just doing the best we can with what we’ve got. And what more could we ask for?
Do you ever feel like you don’t quite have it “all together”? How have you dealt with the emotions you have felt?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by Roxanne of Nevada, USA. You can find Roxanne at her editorial website, RoxannePiskel.com, and her personal blog, Unintentionally Brilliant.
Photo credit to Lina Hayes. This photo has a creative commons attribute license.
Roxanne is a single mother to a 9-year-old superhero (who was born 7 weeks premature), living in the biggest little city and blogging all about her journey at Unintentionally Brilliant. She works as a Program Coordinator for the NevadaTeach program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Roxanne has a B.A. in English from Sierra Nevada College. She has about 5 novels in progress and dreams about completing one before her son goes to high school.
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by Ruth | May 15, 2014 | Motherhood, Parenting, Ruth Wong, Singapore
I am not sure about you, but I find motherhood challenging – more so than any job I’ve ever had.
In the early days, I was often worrying about not being a “good enough” mom or making terrible mistakes in my parenting.
As time goes by, I began to gain greater confidence with my role as a mom. What really helped me though, was finding my own mantras that enable me to focus on what’s important, keep me grounded and lessen the stress, and frustrations.
My mommy mantras
1. This is just a phase.
It is hard when we are going through them, but many of the challenges we face in bringing up our kids are just passing phases as part of their growing up. From breastfeeding, dealing with numerous waking up throughout the night, to the seemingly endless diaper-changing and toddler tantrums, I’ve come to realize, and take comfort in the knowledge that these trying times don’t last forever. It’s true when other moms tell me “This too will pass.”
2. I don’t need to compare or compete.
Motherhood is not a comparison game. Neither is it a competition. I keep reminding myself that while we encounter similar challenges as moms, we are ultimately different because of the unique combination of our personalities, social, cultural, and professional backgrounds. Comparing or competing with another will not make us better moms. What matters is that we give the best we can to our children. Keeping this thought in my mind really helps to remove unnecessary stress I might have placed upon myself.
The same thing goes with comparing kids. As hard as it is, we should really stop comparing our kids with other children or even among siblings. Each child is special and unique, and that’s what we should focus on. Look for the gifts and talents that lie in each one of them and help them to blossom into their best selves.
3. Focus on what’s done well.
Instead of feeling bad about our parenting misses, focus on what’s done right or done well and do more of them. When we focus on the negative, we feel stressed and discouraged. So instead of putting ourselves down, give ourselves a pat on the back and celebrate how far we’ve come as parents, and the good we’ve done. It will motivate us to do better.
4. Enjoy more, worry less.
I was on a flight to Hong Kong with my then one-and-a-half year-old son and chatted with a female passenger next to me who left me a piece of advice. “Enjoy your son,” said the mom of grown up kids. What? Enjoy my son? I was at a point where I was struggling as a mom and didn’t get it at first. But slowly, it dawned on me what a great piece of advice it was. Instead of getting frustrated by my boy’s mischief or worry about 101 things that may not even happen, I can choose to relax and focus more on enjoying the relationship with him. At the end of the day, it’s the relationships with our kids that matter.
5. My needs are as important as my family’s.
As moms and women, we tend to be sacrificial and put our needs last. No wonder we often feel exhausted and unappreciated. If our needs go unmet for too long, we may even begin to resent our kids and spouse.
Reminding myself to honor my needs and make time for myself to rest, to do things I enjoy and to pursue my dreams, I am ensuring that I stay sane, happy and fulfilled. Guess that’s one of the best gifts I can give my family.
How about you? What other mommy mantras do you live by?
This is an original World Moms Blog post by Ruth from Mommy Cafe of Singapore.
The image used in this post is credited to Sura Nualpradid and downloaded from freedigitalphotos.net
Ruth lives in Singapore, a tiny island 137 kilometres north of the equator. After graduating from university, she worked as a medical social worker for a few years before making a switch to HR and worked in various industries such as retail, banking and manufacturing. In spite of the invaluable skills and experiences she had gained during those years, she never felt truly happy or satisfied. It was only when she embarked on a journey to rediscover her strengths and passion that this part of her life was transformed. Today, Ruth is living her dreams as a writer. Ironically, she loves what she does so much that at one point, she even thought that becoming a mom would hinder her career. Thanks to her husband’s gentle persuasions, she now realises what joy she would have missed out had she not changed her mind. She is now a happy WAHM. Ruth launched MomME Circle, a resource site to support and inspire moms to create a life and business they love. She has a personal blog Mommy Café where she writes about her son's growing up and shares her interests such as food and photography.
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by Sarah Sensamaust | May 14, 2014 | 2014, Africa, Being Thankful, Cultural Differences, Expat Life, Family, Living Abroad, Motherhood, Parenting, Relocating, Stress, World Moms Blog
That’s a termite mound, not a rock!
I’ve reached a time in my life when it’s easy to be anxious about so many things. I think that most mothers of small children, whether living abroad or not, are often plagued by the anxiety bug.
For the last six years, my family and I have lived in Congo and we’re moving away in just a few weeks. I find myself thinking back to all those worries, big and small, that I had about raising two kids in the proverbial “heart of darkness.”
So as an exercise of gratitude and reassurance before we begin our next African adventure, I’ve been reflecting on all the what-ifs –real and imagined – that never came true.
Those mosquito bites never led to malaria.
There were no broken bones, stitches or other ailments that couldn’t have otherwise struck us in the United States.
Getting stopped by the police was never more than a hassle and a good story.
Our girls made it to and from school every day without incident.
We never ran out of quality disposable diapers, Sensodyne toothpaste, or anything else we hoarded from home.
My shoes held up.
Every fever went away without too much suffering.
Nothing was ever stolen (that we noticed).
No one was bitten by a snake or spider and a few worms in the feet were no big deal.
The termites never swarmed and carried our children away.
The vehicles always returned to their respective lanes before a head-on collision.
No one was lost in an angry mob.
We never got sick from all that “questionable” food.
That crazy Congo lightning never came through our window and zapped me in my bed.
Both of my pregnancies were picture perfect.
The electricity always came back on.
The water always returned.
The internet was always repaired.
The planes did not crash.
We made friends. Good, lifelong friends.
And no one is worse for the wear.
As infinitely grateful as we are for all these things that never happened, we’re even more so for everything that did. We had two beautiful children, our family learned a new language and we reached far out of our comfort zone. We will forever be connected to the culture and people we grew to love in Congo.
I hope that the next time everyday stressors take over, I’ll be able to stop and think about this list and remember more often than not everything is alright in the end.
What things have you worried about that never ended up happening?
This is an original post written for World Moms Blog by Sarah Sensamaust. You can find Sarah blogging with Jill Humphrey at Mama Congo.
Photo credits to the author.
