Exhaustion

Travelin'Oma, Week 8, Day 4.

Exhaustion.

Today I am very, very tired. It is partly because I am getting over being sick, partly because my children haven't been sleeping very well at night lately, and partly because I am trying to help them learn - and that is exhausting. I feel pretty strongly about raising children to be independent, but I was reminded today of how taxing that can be on a mother.

All I wanted my two-year-old and four-year-old to do this afternoon was to pick up the toys in the playroom, a job that could have taken me ten minutes to do. Instead, we had a battle verging on the magnitude of Gettysburg for several hours until they finally finished the task at hand. For the first hour or so, I maintained my cool (to some degree) while I slowly took away privileges that I had offered at the beginning as a reward for cleaning up - candy corns, popcorn, and a movie after dinner. Not only were they less than compliant in the cleaning up department, but they were fighting, yelling, hitting, and throwing as well, all inappropriate behaviors in our family. By the end, I was not very happy (that is probably an understatement) and they were lucky they didn't have to go to bed before dinner. However, it is now clean and they are in bed, I will be going to bed in a few minutes, and I am still glad that I work so hard to help them be independent, even when it makes my life difficult.