A Parenting Fail Story

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Parenting Fail picHi moms! I’m Ann, the newest Scottsdale Mom’s Blog contributor. If your Christmas season is anything like most, you could use a little humor right about now. Hope you enjoy this first light-hearted post of mine!

Don’t you sometimes need to hear other moms’ parenting fails to feel better about your own? Well, I have one for you today. This one comes courtesy of having two babies just thirteen months apart.

The morning started off rough. My almost two year old is fiercely into hair pulling (mine) and I cannot get him to stop even when I clenched-teeth growl in his face…parenting fail #1.

After we both cooled down I decided we needed some fresh air and a chance to run around outside. With the weather now cool, we headed to “our park” in Arcadia. My older guy, 22 months, is getting more adventurous and I love seeing him work up the nerve to slide down the big slide for the first time. He’s also interacting more and more with other kids, which is cute. (Except when there’s hair pulling…that’s not so great.) Nevertheless, it looked like we were turning the morning around after all.

I was baby-wearing my 9-month-old little gal and had my Dutch Bros. coffee in hand while I supervised little guy on the playground. After a pretty successful hour or so of play, I decided it was time to head out and braced myself for our exit.

“Time to go bud, let’s get home and have lunch,” I said to my guy. Not surprisingly his response was, “no” punctuated with a shake of his head. What followed is what we moms deal with every day. The toddler meltdown with repeated escape attempts back to whatever activity they were, in their mind, so cruelly asked to leave.

I’ve resolved myself not to be the mom who drags her kids, but it’s really hard to fully pick up a squirming, kicking almost two year old and get him to the car when you have another human strapped to you. Either we were going to have to live in this park, or I had to leave one kid behind to get the other in the car.

Reading my mind, a sympathetic mom gave me the eye and said, “I’ll watch him.” Thanks, perfect stranger, I thought to myself as my kid ran out of sight back to the playground and I hustled my infant to the car. I returned for him a few minutes later to find a different mom carrying him toward our car and assuring him that we could come back to the park another day. This time I thanked perfect stranger #2 out loud and I got everyone into the car and we headed home.

Ok, this wasn’t exactly an epic fail in terms of parenting, at least not for me. In fact, with two so close together it’s pretty much my norm. Later in the day I shared the details of our morning struggle with my sister who laughed. She told me about a similar, frazzled woman she had seen lose it with her daughter and crash her stroller in the park just that morning. Her fail wasn’t epic either, but it made me feel better, and not alone, so I wanted to pay it forward with my own less-than-graceful story.

During this time of year when the Internet can make you feel bad by showing you all the crafts, baking, and memory making you could be doing with your kids if you were a better mom, it’s nice to acknowledge the simple daily struggle we all go through and laugh about it.

1 COMMENT

  1. I feel like this could have totally been me the last couple of months! Thanks for sharing and keeping it real!

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