Kids and the City

About “Kids and the City”

First of all, I am not a parenting expert.  Far from it, unless the number of children one has is directly proportional to their expertise when it comes to bossing the little beasts people around.  Like a complicated mathematical equation, one could form a parental authority ranking using an equation like she = x, and the number of kids she has = y.  If you multiply the two together, you get another number, equalling z, which represents some authority on a make-believe parenting scale of knowledge.  That’s too complicated for me.  I was an English major, so my experience in the field of applied mathematics does not surpass 100 level geometry.  Alas, my parental authority would most likely lie somewhere in the middle, which I think is just fine.

 That being said, I have three kids.

Therefore, I have some knowledge of children and the bribes things that may or may not work when it comes to raising them.  Of course, I’ve tried hundreds of torture tactics things that haven’t worked when it comes to parenting, but for every ten things I’ve tried, it is quite possible than one method worked.  It is from those little steps forward that I fill my jar of tricks and hope to share these little secrets as they present themselves to me.  I also share what gets tossed out, the grass clippings in the lawnmower of child-rearing, so that others may learn from my mistakes.  Believe me, there will be a lot of these!

But it is from my children, my offspring, my muses, that I take the most pride.  They not only provide me with a funny story to tell, but they show me, every once in a great while, that I’m really not doing such a horrible job in raising them.  For all the headaches they inspire, so do they weave an intricate portrait of love within our family when I catch them being nice to one another.

And so, join me here as I write my way through motherhood, the good, the bad and the ugly - literally, because we all know that being a parent isn’t a pretty job most of the time.  But on those good days, it’s beautiful.  All we can do is recognize when something has worked, recognize when something’s failed and try to learn from our experiences.