There’s a million things I swore I’d never do once we had kids, most of which I now laugh about. Some things we stick to our guns on and some are still very important to us. Some went out the window faster than my days of getting 8 solid hours of sleep.
Fast Food
I didn’t swear it off completely but I swore not one single bite before 4 years old. I didn’t want my kids to be addicted to bad foods. All organic all the time otherwise we would be failures as parents. I don’t remember when exactly that went out the window but I think it was around the time a certain “royal” restaurant introduced a value menu. By the time I was pregnant with our second and craving fast food items our daughter knew what her favourites were.
TV
“My kids will be smart, I won’t rot their brains. No TV before 2. The experts all say no TV before 2 or our kids will be stupid”. Of course, when I made these comments I forgot that I am addicted to TV. So it started with, “Well, if I just have my shows on while she’s an infant that won’t affect her”. To this day, the Gilmore Girls theme song still immediately calms both of my kids. But I will never use the TV as a babysitter, until the day I needed to do some housework and prep for visitors. That is the day we discovered the acid trip-like world of Yo Gabba Gabba.
Lie to my kids
I promised to always tell the truth to my kids, no matter what. I don’t want to risk losing their trust with even the tiniest fib. And how could anyone ever teach their child not to tell lies if you aren’t leading by example? At that point, I didn’t know the joys of hearing “can we go to the park? Can we go to the park? Can we go to the park?” 400 times in a row, with no honest explanation as to why we can’t being acceptable. Yet somehow “the slide is asleep” stopped the questioning.
Bribe With Food
I don’t even remember why this was a bad thing but I know I read a terrifying article about it and swore I’d never do it. Then came the time when I had a newborn in the house and someone going through “terrible threes”. That was the year we bought so many kinder eggs it would’ve been cheaper to just buy the company. Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do. Dessert or after dinner snacks are still used as bribes. Some people like to call them “rewards” but let’s face it – a rose by any other name…
Terrific Twos
At some point in time some article somewhere on the internet convinced me that it is good to have a stubborn two year old and since it’s developmentally normal we should never call them “terrible twos”. That calling them that will saddle our children with years of therapy bills. It took a whole month into full blown “terrific” twos phase for me to realize why it’s called “terrible”. My child is not terrible but spending a year going through this developmental stage sure is for everyone around her. I think the therapy bills will have my name on the top of them after that, not hers.
