by Katinka | Feb 17, 2014 | 2014, Adoption, Awareness, Being Thankful, Belgium, Birth Parents, Childhood, Cultural Differences, Ethiopia, Eye on Culture, Family, Friendship, Home, Life Lesson, Motherhood, Multicultural, Parenting, Penguin and Panther, Relationships, Siblings, World Motherhood, Younger Children
We have a cat. A lot of people have a cat. Ours is named Rino. As in rhinoceros, minus the “h” and the horn.
Looking back, I got him when he was still a little too small, so he definitely sees me as his cat-mom. He slept in the Big Bedroom during the first months of his life, with me stroking him upon every little yelp. When he wants to cuddle, he tucks his head in my armpit, as if he wants to get nursed. He’s the cuddliest cat I know. And the best frog catcher as well.
Rino is get-out-of-jail-free card. He radiates reassurance. Peace of mind. When I’m overwhelmed by motherhood, he can convince me to allow the children to come back downstairs after their time-out. He reminds me I prefer talking above time-outs.
When the kids are finally asleep, he crashes the couch with me. There’s nothing like the sound and feel of a purring cat to take the daily stress away. Did I mention he’s fat and orange? The perfect blanket. Matches most of my cloths too.
When our son is having a bad morning, he usually refuses to put on his cloths. He goes on strike on the couch, with his head beneath the cushions. We aren’t able to get through to him nor make eye contact. His sister will try, but she always manages to make things worse. Not her fault, and she earns her credits for trying the impossible.
And then Rino comes pawing in. Takes a few bites from his food and then goes straight for his ‘big brother’. The minute I tell my son who is coming for him, we see his face again. Eleven minutes, fifty three strokes and fourteen cuddles later, he will be dressed and heading for breakfast. The same goes for homework, violin practice and heart break: Rino will drag him through.
When our adopted daughter first met Rino, she nearly jumped to the ceiling. She only knew cats as thieves that should be chased from the orphanage’s kitchen, so she hissed and motioned to get him out, hiding behind my skirts. She didn’t develop a liking for stuffed animals either, with a brother sneaking up on her with those. He didn’t particularly like his new little sister those first months and couldn’t stop scaring her away, so we ended up hiding all the stuffed tigers and cats from them both.
Two years later, their bond has grown. They do continue teasing each other. They fight like little demons over who gets to open the curtains in the morning but an hour later in school the little one will call for her brother when she’s running from kissing boys. They always end up wanting to play with the exact same box of Legos that was untouched for weeks before, but just as frequently, they will team up against me, especially when candy is at stake. I was told that is universal proof they’ve developed a sibling bond.
The same goes for Rino. Our daughter considers him part of the family now. She demands we talk about him with first ànd last name, our family name, and she doesn’t believe it’s fair he’s not allowed to go to the zoo with us. He would love the big cats, you know. I’m glad Rino is visibly terrified inside moving vehicles so in the end our daughter’s more or less convinced he wouldn’t really like joining us.
A few weeks ago, my daughter asked how Rino came to our family. Did he come willing? Or was he taken from his mommy? After we hesitantly told her it was the latter, she immediately went to find him and whispered in his ear, “You’re just like me!” Ever since, she considers him her little brother even more.
He has become her mirror, in a way. Whenever she’s fantasizing about what she would like to tell her birth mother, he’s a major part of her story. She would like to send her birth mother pictures and drawings of Rino, but not of herself. Pictures of Rino sleeping in the bird house, of Rino coming from the woods when he hears our car approaching, of Rino sleeping with his paws in the air and head to the side, like a wrongly assembled toy. She wants to tell her all about him.
But most of all, she wants to tell her birth mother that we are such great and loving parents.
For Rino, of course.
Do you have pets that enrich your family? Do they help your children cope with life’s sharp edges? Feel free to share about their funny and serious contributions in your daily life!
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by K10K from The Penguin and The Panther.
The picture in this post is credited to the author.
If you ask her about her daytime job, Katinka will tell you all about the challenge of studying the fate of radioactive substances in the deep subsurface. Her most demanding and rewarding job however is raising four kids together with five other parents, each with their own quirks, wishes and (dis)abilities. As parenting and especially co-parenting involves a lot of letting go, she finds herself singing the theme song to Frozen over and over again, even when the kids are not even there...
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by Roxanne (USA) | Feb 14, 2014 | 2014, Childhood, Cultural Differences, Divorce, Family, Kids, Motherhood, Older Children, Parenting, Rox is Brilliant, Single Mother, Unintentionally Brilliant, USA, World Motherhood, Younger Children
In a conversation with a friend the other day, she mentioned that someone once asked her if I was seriously okay with letting my 7-year-old go to the bathroom by himself. A little while later I read Mama B’s post about how her house is a dungeon of rules, and I suddenly felt extremely guilty for not imposing more rules on my son. (more…)
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 Susan Koh | Feb 13, 2014 | Family, Life Balance, Marriage, Relationships, Singapore, Susan Koh, World Motherhood
World Moms, Susan Koh with her family
We’re just a day away from February 14, Valentine’s Day. And like most moms, we’ve probably stopped celebrating this overrated and grossly commercialized day. In fact for most moms, it’s likely going to be like any another regular day where we send the kids off at school, rush off to work then pick them up before dinner where the whole madness begins at home with the chores, schoolwork and all.
Maybe if we’re lucky, we get a Valentine’s Day card. As for flowers and a romantic dinner set up for two, that’s something to dream about… when your head hits the pillow that is. So is this still a day worth celebrating?
I’ll say yes because we could all use a reminder that we are all wives before we became a mom.
As moms, our lives are often caught up by the day to day demands of our kids that there is hardly any time left for our spouses. And if we do get any pockets of free time, we rather choose sleep anytime. But just like plants, marriages are to be cared for and nurtured in order to blossom and bloom. And while we may not want to get sucked into celebrating Valentine’s Day, it certainly is a day we could use to show our appreciation or do something special for our husbands.
I remember that on our 7th wedding anniversary last year, we celebrated it in an unconventional way by going to a water theme park. We felt like teenagers all over again, holding hands and laughing away as we rushed from one water slide to another, each one more exciting than the previous one. We giggled and had so much fun that day and till now, that day still holds so much memories for me. One of the things I said to my husband is that I want us to remember that we’re husband and wife as much as we’re a mummy and daddy because that’s how this family started off as.
Some simple ways we show that we love each other is going on lunch dates since date nights are a little harder to arrange. Texting each other just to say I’m thinking of you. Always showing appreciation for the big and small things and showing our daughter that we are still very much in love with each other.
And I’m so thankful that while I’m putting my husband first, he’s also doing the same because of this quote that he came across.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
It’s not too late to plan a little something special for Valentine’s Day. In fact, if you are a practical one, everyday can be Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day!
What are your Valentine’s Day plans as a parent? And how has was it different before you became a parent?
This is an original post by Susan Koh for World Moms Blog. She’s loves to travel and blogs passionately about parenting, marriage and relationship and leading a healthy life at www.ajugglingmom.com.
Photo credit to the author.
Susan is from Singapore. As a full-time working mom, she's still learning to perfect the art of juggling between career and family while leading a happy and fulfilled life. She can't get by a day without coffee and swears she's no bimbo even though she likes pink and Hello Kitty. She's loves to travel and blogs passionately about parenting, marriage and relationship and leading a healthy life at A Juggling Mom.
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by Karyn Wills | Feb 10, 2014 | 2014, Awareness, Being Thankful, Brothers, Childhood, Education, Family, Food, Health, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Milestones, Motherhood, Nature, New Zealand, Nutrition, Older Children, Parenting, Relationships, Traditions, Travel, Vacationing, World Motherhood
One of my enduring memories of childhood is of trapsing over paddocks, up and down hills, in gumboots too big for my feet picking mushrooms or blackberries. Eventually getting sore heels and aching legs. Eventually filling buckets and ice-cream containers with food.
Probably scrapping with my sisters. Probably moaning about having to do so. Definitely covered in blackberry juice and scratches on blackberry days. Definitely not impressed by having to pick mushrooms, which I didn’t like to eat.
This summer holiday, my boys got to harvest their own food. Not blackberries and mushrooms, though. They got to harvest seafood.
Tuatua (too-ah-too-ah) are a shellfish. The children love to collect them. We go out at almost low-tide or just after low-tide in thigh-high water. We do the Twist. Our feet sink into the wet sand and feel around for something hard. When we find one, we reach down and pick it up with our hands.
Sometimes, we are side-swiped by a wave. Sometimes, we pick up a round hard sea-biscuit instead. At times, instead of the Tuatua-Twist there is a Crab-Bite-Leap with occasional bad-language. There is almost always laughter and a competition to see who can find the most. This year, the boys and their cousins also took responsibility for collecting fresh seawater twice a day, to keep the Tuatuas in, while they spat out all the sand inside their shells. They kept them cool in the fridge and, when they were finally cooked, the children ate them: some with gusto, others not so much. To me, they taste a bit like chewy seawater…
Our eldest son, 12 year-old Joe, with his 13 year-old girl cousin, Billie, trapped their own crayfish.
Crayfish are related to rock-lobster and, in our extended family, are usually trapped off-shore and by boat, or dived for with scuba-gear and tanks. Joe and Billie had kayaked out around a small peninsula and discovered an old craypot on the rocks. They dragged it out of the sea and managed to convince their fathers to repair it. They then kayaked it out again and dropped it on a good rocky spot.
Each day they went out to check their pot, just as the adults do the other craypots. The first day they caught – seawater. The second day they caught – seawater. The third day they were a bit fed up and otherwise occupied, so didn’t go out. The fourth day or maybe it was the fifth, Billie was out fishing and Joe went out alone to see what was there and to bring the pot in for good. He was very excited to discover they had caught a legal-sized cray! Yes, duly cooked and eaten.
In these days where many children don’t know that carrots grow in the ground or that their meat comes from a real animal, I love that our boys are sometimes involved in the process of food-collection and the processes of preparing it for a meal. I know that these are the Good Old Days and these moments will create some of their childhood memories.
Do your children do similar things you did as a child? Are they involved in collecting or harvesting their own food?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in New Zealand and mum of three boys, Karyn Van Der Zwet.
The image used in this post is credited to the author.
Karyn is a teacher, writer and solo mother to three sons. She lives in the sunny wine region of Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand in the city of Napier.
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by Susie Newday (Israel) | Jan 29, 2014 | 2014, Communication, Israel, Life Balance, Relationships, Stress, Susie Newday
*I wrote this a while back when I was on the verge of losing my mind because of all the thoughts and doubts in my head. On an emotional level, I was living in a state of survival. I felt uptight and tense all the time and I was barely keeping it together. To the world none of that was apparent. I was functioning, maybe even too well. After a lot of hard work, I am not in that place anymore, which is why I guess I feel it is safe to share this now. Sure I still have my self doubts and difficulties, we all do, but these days I don’t feel like I’m living every day in survival mode.
Our lives are full of people. Unless we live like a hermit shut away from human interaction, we have no choice but to engage in human contact, both physical and verbal, numerous times on a daily basis. There are all kinds of people out there. There are those we like more, there are those we like less. There are people we despise or maybe we just think we do. And, because we are lucky there are also people whom we love.
Since I know there is someone in your life you love, I want you to close your eyes and take a moment to think about them. If you want, it can be someone you just like or admire not necessarily love. Have you pictured them well? Do you have a smile on your face?
Now comes the hard part. Why do you feel that way about them?
That question came out of my desire to understand why someone would love or like me. What is it about me or what I am doing that would cause someone to stop and say, hey I like her. And I don’t know if the answer that came to me is the truth and whether it my way of trying to explain away something that can’t be quantified and explained.
Simply put, I think people like/love/admire us for the things we do for them and for others. They like us because of the way we make them feel about themselves. Why do we love our children from the moment we set eyes on them after they’ve been born? Because just by being born they have done something for us. They have given us a new job, a new purpose, new meaning in our lives.
We all want to feel loved. We all want to have the security and comfort of knowing there is someone we can lean on. I’m saying we can’t be loved if we don’t love. We won’t have someone to lean on unless we are there for others. We all want to feel taken care of yet we won’t have that unless we take care of others.
Sometimes it feels like love is tiring. You have to do all the time. Love is work. And I wonder, if I stop, will I still be loved?
Would you still love me
If I had nothing left to give,
If I had no energy to take care of you
If I had nothing you really needed?
Would you still love me
If I didn’t feed you or clean up,
If I didn’t offer my help
If I didn’t seem to care?
Would you still love me
If my mind wasn’t quite as sharp
If I embarrassed you
With my confusion or bursts of anger?
Would you still love me
If my smile left my face forever
If my words went mute
And the music in my soul faded?
Would you still love me
Because of all I once was,
Even if now there was nothing recognizable
About the person sitting before you?
Would everything I have done until now
Be enough for you to still love me?
Love, the age old question
Pondered while hovering over the the precipice of self doubt.
I’m afraid to stop doing, to stop caring, to change the rules that have been golden up until now. I’m afraid to sway the balance of love and acceptance. I’m afraid if I do that I won’t be loved.
I yearn for unconditional love, to be able to give with truly no strings attached and to know that I am loved without having to do anything at all, just because I am a person who has a heart full of love. Is unconditional love just a fantasy residing in empty words or are we really capable of pure love? I wish I really knew.
What I do know, is that first of all I have to love myself, no strings attached. And when I feel like withdrawing, I need to love more.
Why do you think you love and are loved?
This is an original post by World Moms Blog Africa & Middle East Regional Editor, Susie Newday in Israel. You can also find her on her blog New Day New Lesson.
Photo credit to the author.
Susie Newday is a happily-married American-born Israeli mother of five. She is an oncology nurse, blogger and avid amateur photographer.
Most importantly, Susie is a happily married mother of five amazing kids from age 8-24 and soon to be a mother in law. (Which also makes her a chef, maid, tutor, chauffeur, launderer...) Susie's blog, New Day, New Lesson, is her attempt to help others and herself view the lessons life hands all of us in a positive light. She will also be the first to admit that blogging is great free therapy as well. Susie's hope for the world? Increasing kindness, tolerance and love.
You can also follow her Facebook page New Day, New Lesson where she posts her unique photos with quotes as well as gift ideas.
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by Tinne from Tantrums and Tomatoes | Jan 27, 2014 | 2014, Being Thankful, Belgium, Communication, Health, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Motherhood, Pregnancy, Relationships, Stress, Tantrum and Tomatoes, Women's Rights, Working Mother, World Motherhood
If you Google bullying, there is a whole plethora of websites to choose from. Most of them deal with how to prevent your kid from bullying, how to react when your kid is bullied/being a bully, how to talk to your child about bullying.
But what if it is you—a fully grown adult—who are being bullied and there is really nothing you can do about it because the bully is also an adult…and your boss? And you cannot afford to lose your job.
Here is the situation: years ago I worked for a small, family owned business (You will understand why I do not name any names). I can best describe my boss as the Belgian cousin of Miranda Priestly, the Devil-boss who wore Prada. Believe me she had her down pat. From the sneering “that’s all,” the calls outside work hours, the berating because I could not divine her thoughts and causing her to suffer the indignity of having to actually tell me what was expected, the pout…
Oh yeah, they were related all right.
After little more than a six months, I was actively looking for another job. And then, a week before I planned to resign and tell her to go do something to herself, I found out I was pregnant. And the game and the world as a whole changed completely.
We had just started building our house, there was no way my husband’s salary would cover all the bills and finding a job while you are pregnant is not easy.
So I stayed on. But it was obvious right from the start that they did not like the idea of having a young mother as employee.
Since I was competent at my job they had no reason to fire me outright and because Belgian legislation is rather protective towards pregnant women in the workplace, it became almost impossible to fire me when I handed over the medical bill announcing my pregnancy.
And so the bullying started.
Little things at first. Saddling me with a huge amount of work half an hour before I was due to clock out. Making a mess of the client contact database, insisting it was my fault, even though there was actual proof that it wasn’t.
But when they noticed that I was relatively unaffected things got BAD. In capitals.
While the company was closed for the summer holidays I got a letter detailing every little thing that I had done wrong after I announced I was pregnant. And I really mean everything, like putting one (1!) sheet of paper for an invoice the wrong way up in the printer causing them the loss of a whole eurocent in paper because I had to reprint the page. After that it got even worse than you can imagine. Belittling me in front of clients, calls at all hours, at all times, screaming, yelling, throwing. One day I came into the office to find that my boss had emptied my trashcan all over my desk. Fun times… I can tell you.
You must wonder how I dealt with the situation. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I did not deal with it.
No, that is wrong. I did deal with it, but not in the way you might imagine. I did nothing.
I showed up for work, I let them scream, I let them yell, I let them belittle me, when they called at 6am on a Sunday I answered the phone and made no complaint. Nothing. When I arrived at the office I did my job. Business as usual.
This was my defense strategy. I did my job and because I continued to do it well, they never had an excuse for firing me.
Yes, I could have filed a complaint for harassment and started a legal procedure. I even started collecting evidence in case I should one day be forced to do so. Chances are very good I would have won, since the evidence was pretty rock solid. Yet, this was never really my intention. I was 29 at the time and legal procedures in Belgium can take a looooooooooooooooooong time. Dragging my employer to court would take ages, it would cost a lot of money and it is the kind of thing which haunts you forever. I still had my way to make in the world, my career was just beginning. A court case was likely to follow me around for my whole life and I did not wish to bring this kind of baggage with me.
I collected—and still keep—the evidence just in case.
In retrospect, I should have gone to my doctor, explained the situation and asked him to declare me unfit for work. But I did not do that. As soon as it was legally possible I resigned and the happy dance I did on my last day of work might have come straight out of a Broadway musical. I never looked back.
Has this situation ever happened to you? What did/would you do?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in Belium, Tinne of Tantrum and Tomatoes.
The image used in this post is credited to Elizabeth Atalay.
Born in Belgium on the fourth of July in a time before the invention of the smart phone Tinne is a working mother of two adorably mischievous little girls, the wife of her high school sweetheart and the owner of a black cat called Atilla.
Since she likes to cook her blog is mainly devoted to food and because she is Belgian she has an absurd sense of humour and is frequently snarky. When she is not devoting all her attention to the internet, she likes to read, write and eat chocolate. Her greatest nemesis is laundry.
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