"Please sit on the sofa. You're too close to the TV. Saloni you've had too much apple juice. Can you please clean up here? Put your shoes on. Can you please hurry up? We do one activity at a time. What happened to your hairpins? We don't scream at the dinner table. Saloni can you be quiet for five minutes? No, we're not watching that show again. It's night night time. No talking. Why are you throwing your Lego? Saloni, feet off the table please....."
At the end of the day, I wonder if I'm exhausted physically from her energy levels or from the list of requests I've had to throw her way. The thing is, I'm a huge disciplinarian and manners and good social skills are so important to me. Put me in a room of scholars and I might start to yawn. But put me in a room of smart socially-adept individuals and I'm all ears. Of course, her grades will be important one day, but for now, I can't help but want to instill as much good behavior as possible. I was talking to a friend about the fine line of being your kid's friend vs. parent. There the friendship days when I let her have ice cream for breakfast and watch an Elmo DVD three times in a row and then there's the parental moments of clean up time and going to bed on time.
My season of motherhood will last a lifetime. But these moments of joy and exhaustion, clean up times and ice cream times are like mango season (which I'm loving right now). Temporary and fleeting. So I'm trying my best to hang onto the sweetness of it all no matter how tired I get. Or as Saloni says to me when I lie down on the sofa, "It's okay Mummy, you'll be okay, I'll massage you." No licensed therapist can beat the touch of her little hands. And if it's true that we are what we eat, ice cream for breakfast will just make her even sweeter.
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