The Life Imagined

One of my current ongoing projects is planning a trip this summer for my two kids and me.  For the record, it’s not that we don’t want my husband to go with us, and he’d love to go. . . but he’s staying behind because (a) he won’t have accrued a week’s paid vacation until he has been working at Amazon for a full year, which won’t happen until September, and (b) part of the reason for the trip is to get Mariah out of the house so that he can do some work on the walls in her room.  So. . . I’ll take off with the kids, and her room can be a work in progress that no one is sleeping in for a week or so.  Right now, the plan is to go to Phoenix to see the Braves play during the last week in May. . . exactly what the travel looks like going out and coming back is still in the planning stages. Yes, I know that many people will think I’m insane for traveling by car to the other side of the country with a 12 year-old (well, he will be by then) and a non-neurotypical 10 year-old.  However, it wou

From what I have observed, many first-time parents have a hard time learning to say “no” to their children.   They fall victim to the pleading eyes and quivering lips – and next thing you know, that toy is in the shopping cart and headed to the register.   Some develop cute kid resistance more quickly than others do. . . some never develop it at all, which quite often directly correlates with the behavior we see out of their children when they’re adults. I didn’t have this problem.   My husband would be the first to admit that he struggled with the whole thing, and it took years for him to feel as though a trip to Wal-Mart wouldn’t be inherently more expensive if the kids were with him.   For me, however, it was pretty easy from the get-go. . . largely because I had two very important things going for me. First of all, I had a good role model: my own mother.   My mama had no trouble whatsoever saying “no” to me, and she also had no trouble whatsoever reminding me that “if I were th