We Really Are Crazy!

I had an epiphany last night. It was amazing! Let me set the scene for you. I was super tired because the last few nights have provided me with little sleep. Both boys have been difficult to put to bed and have fought sleep. I was barely awake enough to keep them entertained. By the time my husband got home from work (which was after 11) I had not gone through my usual evening ritual of doing dishes and sweeping. And I realized I had not eaten dinner. Lovely.

Anyway, I looked around the house and started thinking. Thinking about how I do the same thing every night. The floor gets dirty again, the dishes get dirty again, the boys fight me about something, on and on and on. My thoughts then gravitated toward disciplining the boys, which is also basically doing the same things over and over and over. Most parenting advice consists of being consistent, even when the discipline does not seem to be working because it can take time for children to learn and adjust. Consistency means doing the same thing over and over again, right? Well, what is the definition of insanity? Get where I'm going with this......

Insanity is sometimes defined as repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result. Sounds a lot like consistency! As these thoughts swirled in my head, I suddenly realized that's why people always say parents are crazy! And to tell you the truth, I think a lot of us are. Now I do not mean that in a bad way, at all. But you really have to be in order to keep yourself from tearing your hair out and putting your clothes on backwards. Don't you think?

Let me give you a personal example. When my oldest son was about a year old, my husband and I went out to dinner. I don't remember where we were, but I remember he was old enough to have a sippy cup full of water (this comes back later in the story). We had gotten our food and were only a few bites into the meal, when my son promptly threw up. Later we realized he had too much water to drink and had gotten sick because of that. Anyway, when he got sick, he got some on my plate. My husband was working on getting him cleaned up and I was picking the food off my plate that had been thrown up on. In my defense, a good part of my plate was still fine and I was thinking I could save most of it. My husband looked at me and asked me what I was doing. There I was, picking vomit out of my plate trying to salvage my dinner (in my defense, I was pregnant with our youngest son and I was at the really hungry point of the pregnancy). Can you think of any other way to describe that than insanity?