I am Human, I am Flawed....

I am human, I am flawed!

My friend Sara just posted an entry in her blog about needing to fall in love with  parenting  again. you can read all about it here.

After reading her post and having a morning where I lost my cool, I felt the need to compose a post about this topic as well.

So there we were in the kitchen: my 13 year old and I. He was making breakfast (something he needed to do to earn his cooking badge for Boyscouts) I was overseeing the project and helping him along the way. (okay maybe criticizing a bit too much and being a bit control freaky about how he was doing things). I don't even know how it happened or what exactly set me off, but next thing I know I was yelling at him. Oh yes, I remember now. I showed him how to cut and wash celery then gave him the stalks. He then washed them and cut them without cutting the tops off. For whatever reason this  made me extremely mad and I lost my cool even to the point of grabbing my sons face when he tried to look away from me and give me attitude about the whole situation.

Ten  minutes later I apologized to him for grabbing his face and yelling.

I have been feeling very irritable lately and snapping at my children. Just because I have a 7 week old, 4 other kids, am sleep deprived and have a  a husband who works 7 days a week and loooooong hours at our business does not give me an excuse.

I need to be a better Mom.
I need to stop yelling.
I need to take a deep breathe and walk away sometimes.

I may look like I have it all together most days but a lot of the time I am screaming inside my head and trying so hard to keep a smile on my face and maintain my cool.

So if you see me  out in the world with all 5 of my kids know that I may look like I have it all together but I do not.

I am not perfect but I am working daily on becoming a better me.

This one made me laugh, I have never done this but close I did strip the sheets off of  the mattress then just threw a towel over the mattress and sent a child back to sleep instead of remaking the whole bed. I do use waterproof covers on the mattress so the actual mattress wasn't wet.

It's a heat wave!!

It's a heat wave!!

We have had record cold temps in the subzeros here all winter so when it hit 60 degrees 3 days on a row this week I felt that school was not so important and some outside play was. For 3 days the kids played outside for at least 5 hours each day. I sat happily in the house with Canary for the first day and just watched the kids play.

They used their imaginations and played a game called frontier.
They each made their own territories out of materials found in and around the yard
They had a general store
They had rocks they used as currency
They defended their own territories when neighboring people tried to inhabit their area or steal land and supplies
They grew crops, cooked and traded goods
They hunted wild game
They tapped the maple tree in the front yard to get syrup (all pretend)

Robin's territory- she was cooking!

We just finished up the Little House in the Big Woods, so  a lot of their ideas stemmed from that.

On day 3 they made the most creative fort (I didn't get any pictures though) they made a lean to up against the house (that has new vinyl siding)  and wove newspaper, and broken bush limbs between the limbs the packed around it with leaves. I was mad when I saw it and made them immediately take it down because I was afraid they were going scratch up the siding. I really wish I would have taken a picture it was a really creative fort.

Baby canary and I enjoying some sunshine.

Owl bringing  me a twig from our maple tree and saying he found maple syrup in it.

Papabird came home  from his trip out of state and saw the surprise  Falcon  and I  worked on while he was gone.We didn't completely finish the basement because I did too much too soon after baby was born  and had some serious bleeding issues so my midwives grounded me to the couch.

Before

After (almost done, but not finished yet)

The van died again....sigh!

What will we work on next week when he is in South America?