Real Life Mommy

I feel like I'm finally getting into the swing of this whole mommy thing.

My child is old enough to make a giant mess at every meal, warrant a bath every day (sometimes more than one a day), I'm too busy to actually bathe her every day, she is fascinated with dropping things, screaming, and dumping out everything. Violet has acquired the ability to make a nice neat stack of toys a giant mess is less than five minutes, and immediately afterwards completely loses interest in her toys, and instead starts examining the floor for dirt and trash (which is always abundant). She does most of this while smiling, babbling, giggling, and making my heart melt.

This is the mommy life I read about. What's funny is that as exhausting as it can be, it's SOOO GOOD. I know my floor is dirty (even though I scrubbed it on hands and knees a few days ago). I know the laundry is piled up on the couch. Even though we do at least one load a day, we only catch up all the dishes about once a week. The "dining" table is inevitably the place we pile books and sewing stuff, and the bathroom floor still has last week's mail on it. (Because who hasn't gone out to check the mail only to realize they had to use the bathroom RIGHT THEN, and proceeded to read the mail on the toilet? This is real life people.)

 I LOVE taking her to grocery store. Sure, she gets bored after a while and wants to be held, and plays with my keys and drops them a thousand times, but she also gets excited when a stranger smiles back at her and smiles when I show her different fruits and vegetables as I put them in the cart. She babbles at me as I tell her about what I'm buying and what we will make with it. Someday she is going to be my favorite shopping partner. I know, because every time I take her with me (along with the inconvenience), I show her that I care about her. I show her that shopping is a special time to talk to mommy. I show her that it can be fun, rewarding, and economical :) I could choose to shop when I wouldn't need to take her with me, but most of the time I don't.

 Real life as a mommy has required some adjustments to my parenting ideas. I've thrown out so many of the things I've said I would never do. I've embraced the season that we are in and whatever makes that season more enjoyable. So that means she isn't in cloth diapers everyday (although we do still use them regularly), we eat cereal puffs from the can, we adore anything that can be picked up with little fingers that isn't messy, and we like the idea of applesauce in a squeezable pouch. It means that we don't always read a story before bed, she doesn't always wear pajamas, and at home, she doesn't always even wear pants.

Real life mommy holds to only one real belief as far as parenting goes and that is to train my child in the way that she should go. Not train her one way, then train her another way, then another. Our life is messy and imperfect, and that's okay. She goes where we go. She eats what we eat. She starts out how we want her to continue on.

It's a beautiful mess.