Welcome to 2016 !
I hope that you and your family have had a nice holiday season.
Now that it is almost back to normal routine, I thought I’d share a few snippets that have caught my eye over the break. The first is a wonderful quote from Jamie Martin from Simple Homeschool. As home educating parents it’s very easy to slip into a sort of personal martyrdom over getting enough time for ourselves as people. I know I fall in to this trap each year, and putting in place a plan to avoid it is one of my personal 2016 resolutions.
Math time will not be more important than Mommy time–each will have their proper place, and I will not sacrifice the essence of who I am on a self-made altar of perfectionism.
No longer will I take a back seat to the home educating of my kids. We will be equal partners in this process where they will get a much better role model, and a much more resilient and relaxed Mum. If you are an introvert who home educates, you might like the blog post this quote came from, 15 new year’s resolutions for the introverted homeschool mom.
My other parenting / educating resolutions come from a single blog post by Dr Laura Markham of Aha Parenting. You might have noticed me posting about her writings before. Well, this blog post on Preventative Maintenance is going to be a cornerstone for me this year. I have been hit and miss with this in the past year and I think I’ve stored up quite a bit of work for myself as a result.
In essence my 2016 Parenting Goals are:
- Look after Myself
- Daily roughhousing
- Daily special time
- Empathic limit setting
Interestingly, the order I have chosen to write those in is probably the priority they need to take. If I let myself get run down there is no mental or physical bounce that will allow me to roughhouse or be fully participative in our special time. And without the stress-release of roughhousing and special time, the likelihood is a greater need for limit setting. Without a rested Mum, the limit setting is unlikely to be empathic, so here we are… full circle.
In a very loving and kind way – 2016 is going to be about ME.
What’s 2016 going to be about for you? I’d love to hear.
The Pukeko Patch 