Revisit to "Things I have learned"

I love rereading old emails.  I found this one the other day from a class that I was teaching with Ivy Blumberg.  Thought you might all enjoy....

Things I have learned:


1. Don’t let stress rule in the morning. We can pass our stress on to our children and set them up for a stressful day. It also impairs our judgment. It causes you to do things like pulling out of the driveway with the passenger door open. (I never knew that a van door could bend in half…literally!)

2. Don’t let fast food become your norm. When you do have time to serve a home cooked meal, the children won’t eat it because it doesn’t come in a wrapper.

3. Don’t buy a house with white tile floors if you have three boys.

4. There is no house cleaning fairy. And no matter how hard you pray, God will not clean the house for you either.

5. If you think that teenagers need you less, you haven’t been reading the paper or watching the news. The amount of money you will spend on your kids increases in direct proportion to their age.

6. Don’t forget to pray in the morning. Going out into a working moms day without the protection of prayer is like trying white water rafting without an oar. You go wherever the ripples take you rather than where you want to go.

7. Don’t try to make up for a lack of previous vacations by visiting an entire state in one week.

8. Don’t let guilt dictate your decisions. This will lead to you to making decisions like having 15 11-year-old boys over for a sleep over after you have worked 70 hours in a week.

9. Don’t take on more than you can chew…situations get out of hand quickly…the police are called and soon you have four eleven year olds spread out on the hood of a police car. This is not a good testimony to your neighbors.  (And yes....this really happened!)

10. Teach your children to pick up their toys when they are non-lethal. Lego’s cause a momentary pain, fishhooks require an ER visit.

And lastly….

Don’t forget to laugh. It may cause more wrinkles than crying but your children won’t look at your red eyes and wonder if you’ve been smoking things that you’ve warned them about.