After a brief hiatus from this series, I am so excited to bring it back to life. The lovely Nadia from her blog “The Non Adventures of A Stay At Home Mom” has bravely volunteered to be featured and I just love her Parenting Win vs Parenting Fail stories.

If this is the first time you are reading one of these, I started a series where I feature a mom who is willing to share a Parenting Win vs Parenting Fail stories. The Parenting Win stories are where moms get to brag about their greatest achievement (other than keeping them alive) as a mom. These tend to be really small achievements to everyone else, but to the mom involved they are huge! The Parenting Fail stories are stories where you felt like you really dropped the ball (mine was a doozy!), the point is to make other mom’s realise that there is no such thing as a Perfect Parent. We all make mistakes but we learn from them and move on.

Over to Nadia:

The lovely Carly has kindly asked me to write a feature on Parenting Win vs Parenting Fail. I confess this seemingly easy topic really stumped me and it was the Fail part that held me back. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I couldn’t think of one (haha! So so many to choose from), the problem was that I couldn’t pick out one major fail from the hundreds of minor fails that occur as part of our day-to-day life. Then I realised that one stood out more than the others so here goes:

#ParentingWin

I like to think that we are doing our best to instill confidence in our eldest. She has always been a mummy’s girl and at almost four years old she’s my little shadow. I left work a week before my maternity leave ended because I was completely and totally smitten and we have been inseparable ever since. It’s quite unusual in this day and age but she hasn’t been to daycare except for a two month stint around her third birthday. Life got in the way (illness, new baby, relocation) and we took her out. Suffice to say, she hasn’t had much interaction with other kids. This has been a cause for concern of late as she starts school in a month and we were stressed out about how she will handle herself with the other kids…until three weeks ago.

I had taken her down to the jungle gym area to play and there were two other kids there, a little boy slightly older than her and a girl who was probably about eight. I could see as soon as we got there that she desperately wanted to play with them. She would climb up the ladder while throwing furtive looks in their direction but they pretty much ignored her. I was quite curious as to what she would do so I didn’t encourage her and instead I sat on the bench and let her play. Not too long afterwards she came to me and asked if she could play with them. I told her to go and ask them if she could join. Would you believe it, my shy little girl who hides from her extended family ran straight up to them and asked to play.

I was so proud!

Before I could fully revel in how she has grown she ran right back and said she wanted to go for a walk. I had been watching them the whole time and hadn’t seen anything negative happen so I didn’t know why the fun had ended so quickly. She took my hand and we went for a walk. As we walked I asked her why she had left the kids so quickly and her response almost made my heart pop. She said “they had funny faces so I left”. That may seem as though she didn’t like their looks but what she meant was that she could see that they didn’t really want to play with her so she left. They didn’t smile at her at all. She could have stuck around to try to fit in but she didn’t. She didn’t feel welcome so she left. The best part is that she wasn’t even upset by the whole situation, she moved on as only kids can. Clearly we are doing something right to have raised such a confident young girl. That was a very proud mummy moment.

And now my #ParentingFail:

I hate that I do this but I spend way too much time on my phone. The worst part is that I’m usually not even doing anything constructive, just mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. As if ignoring my two darling girls isn’t bad enough, I get really snappy when I’m interrupted. I hear myself being too abrupt or saying ‘one minute honey, I won’t be long’ too many times. Today my daughter was sitting next to me on the couch while I was catching up on whatsapp messages and she very quietly said ‘mummy I don’t like when you look at your phone. You not listening to me’. That crushed me. It’s one thing to know you have a bad habit but another for it to be pointed out, especially by your kid. So now my new rule is to not check my phone until the evening when they go to bed. Unless the phone rings of course. Kids learn from example and if I don’t show them respect by being present then how can I expect the same from them as they get older?

And that my dears are my highest and lowest points on this roller coaster of a parenting journey. Thank you Carly for letting me share.

Thanks so much Nadia.

Both your stories have great lessons for all of us parents to learn from and pay attention to.

Please check out Nadia’s blog: The Non Adventures Of A SAHM and you can also follow her on Instagram.

If you’d like to be featured, let me know. You can comment on this post, or email me at momof2littlegirls@gmail.com

If you’d like to catch up on the previous posts from the series, please do: