Parenting with Sanity & Joy

mealtimes by minimizing how often you need to ask yourself what you’re going to make for dinner. Keep a list of successful meals and rotate through them. You can also relegate a certain dish or type of dish to a day of the week, such as Meatless Mondays or Taco Tuesdays. Maybe there is one day each week where you serve something completely new like New Food Fridays. Let the kids be involved in this plan as well.

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Archive electronically

Store your child’s creations electronically. You can include every piece of art, like every gold-starred homework sheet, or only the ones you both love, like the Mother’s Day poems you were given. Apps are available for just this purpose, probably developed by parents who either suffered extreme guilt about throwing away anything sentimental or did not have enough closet space for the myriad plastic bins needed to contain a lifetime of Cheerio art.

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Create a notebook to organize milestone materials

Make each of your children a loose-leaf notebook with file folders for each grade. Include their annual doctor’s report, school and team photos, report cards and any special certificates. When your child is done with high school, you will have documentation of all the important records. And, when they move into their own place, it makes a fun gift to pass on.

Childhood is a short season.

—Helen Hayes

One Last Tip

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Love ’em every chance you get

Before you know it, they will be grown and starting their own lives. Grab that hug at every opportunity. In fact, try not to leave the house without a hug, a kiss, or an “I love you.” It’s unlikely you will ever regret making this effort, no matter how pressed you are for time. You will always be your child’s parent, but your time together really does go fast.

Acknowledgments

I am lucky to have been able to continue to learn and grow as a parent from my own mistakes as well as from the mistakes and examples of my dear friends (you know who you are)! I am grateful to my husband, Bill, for his always valuable perspective and endless support. My own children, Victoria and Hudson, are now young adults, and I appreciate having such good-natured test subjects who always showed me the error of my ways. They have taught me that good parenting is a constant, lifelong, learning process and that the true sign of “success” is not that your children are “perfect,” but rather that they are happy, capable, and kind.

Thank you to Dayna Steele for giving me the original idea for writing this book and encouraging me to make it happen. Thanks to Jessica Wolf, who went through every tip and rewrote them to have a consistent voice and a touch of humor. Thank you to Angela Engel, Elisabeth Saake, Amy Treadwell, and the rest of the Collective Book Studio team for helping me create such a beautiful book.