Living undistracted

-
I had a pretty painful realisation this evening.

Every night as I feed my kids to sleep, I either play around on my phone (if I have a hand free, which is not always the case when feeding two at the same time!) or I pretend to be asleep so that my toddler won't have anything to distract her from falling asleep.

Often she performs various gymnastics (Downward Dog with nipple in mouth is a particular favourite) or she attempts to engage with me, kiss me... and until this evening I've always dismissed that as attempts to evade sleep, so I ignored or discouraged it. But what if those attempts at connecting with me are genuine expressions of love? I believe they are - and as of now I'll no longer distract myself or ignore her, I will receive and reciprocate her love and if that means some extra time at bedtime then so be it. I enjoy her company, after all.

I don't think I'll ever make a draconian resolution like getting rid of Facebook or the smartphone - after all it's not the tool but the mindset which takes me out of the moment. I can be perfectly distracted without a smartphone, if I'm physically there but making my shopping list in my head. And to be fair, I do enjoy my children so much that I'm pretty good at being fully present with them, much of the time.

But, no more distractions at bedtime.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

-
Image
Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

-
Image
Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t
Read more

2023: Our Year

-
Image
This is the yearly roundup post - as I've done almost every year for 2022 ,  2021 ,  2020 ,  2019 ,  2018 ,  2017 , 2016 seems to be skipped as I got to grips with mothering two little ones, and  2015 . 2023 was, for us, a year of highlights and milestones as well as getting on with life and growing.  Milestones This year, Mr. and I were married for the third (!) time, almost exactly ten years after we first tied the knot. Some of the background (and lots more pictures) about this is here  - in short, our three weddings were firstly the Register Office legal wedding that only Mr.'s parents attended as witnesses; secondly the church wedding at City Church where we invited everyone, also in 2013; and now, finally, following the annulment of Mr's previous marriages, we made our marriage sacramental by having it convalidated in the Catholic Church. 2023 was also the year that saw N(9)'s First Holy Communion. A beautiful celebration of her now being old enough to understand
Read more