Parenting 101-adapting as you go

This is very typical for our family: Charlie playing his ds, Julia reading a book, while life goes on around them.

It is also very typical to repeatedly go into Charlie's room and remind him to put the ds or book away because it is 10:30 at night. Julia I don't remind as much, as she is learning to manage her own time well.

Some nights I'm too tired and I just want to sleep instead of being a good mom and helping my almost 10 year old go to bed. And then we all pay for it in the morning when he has a really hard time waking up.

It's a work in progress, this mothering thing.

Other things I have worked out. Yesterday was beautiful here, so I took Henry and Nora to the park. The first park we tried was closed because the wind storm the night before had knocked down so many branches. The park with the bathroom, unfortunately. So we found another one. Without a bathroom.

5 minutes into being there, Nora comes dancing over to tell me she has to go potty. Leaving and finding a bathroom wasn't an option, because I wouldn't want to come back. And she couldn't pee behind a tree or on the car tire like I let Henry. (He loves having something to aim at, and then I don't feel quite as bad since most of the pee ends up on our own tire. Please tell me other moms let their boys do this?)

But luckily for all of us I am a huge diet soda addict and I just happened to have a large McDonald's cup in the car. So we climbed in the back of the van, she did her thing, and back to playing we went. After I disposed of said cup in the trash, of course.

It wasn't 5 minutes later that another little girl ran up to her mom and said she had to go potty. Nora, hearing this, perked right up and said, "My mommy let me go pee in a cup!!!"

The other mom didn't look around to see who this little girl's weird mother was, thankfully, but I laughed and laughed. It just seemed so fitting somehow that Nora would be so excited about peeing in a cup and wanted  the world to know. And I wouldn't tell her NOT to tell anyone. In fact, I highly recommend keeping a large soda cup in your vehicle for just such an emergency.

Just remember to throw it away;)