As parents, we make many sacrifices for our kids. I’m normally okay with that but I realized today that this is not one of those times. You see my birthday falls on Easter this year. It’s happened before. A few times it fell on Good Friday. At first, I was excited until I realized that my birthday celebration was going to be overshadowed by Easter festivities. I thought I could handle it but I am ready to have a big ole hissy fit pretty soon.
I decided that I would celebrate on Saturday. That I would do something I wanted to do. However, when you have kids, especially young kids, there’s no such thing as “doing what I want to do.” I wanted to check out a new exhibit at the Museum of Mobile. That was how I planned to spend my day before my birthday. Of course, all Tyler could think about was “When are we going to the gift shop so that I can get something?” After a dozen times telling him that this outing wasn’t all about him, I gave up and decided that maybe I would just come back to the exhibit during the week when he was at school.
Then, there was an open-air artist market directly across from the museum. Cool. I figured we could walk around, look at some art, and pretend to have money to actually pay for it. Wrong. “When are we going to eat, mama? Huh, huh, mama. Mama are you listening to me?”
So off we went to get something to eat. I figured we would go to a nice restaurant; no McDonald’s today. I had heard about this oyster bar and restaurant and after calling to make sure rugrats were allowed, we traipsed to the restaurant for what I was sure would be a nice meal. Okay, at least this part of my celebration turned out fairly well. He was so excited about being in an establishment where there was an actual bar that he halfway behaved himself.
There was a bit of skirming here and there, but all in all, he did okay.
Setting expectations too high. That’s all it really boils down to. You see I forget that although Tyler is intellectually gifted he’s still just six-years-old and can’t be expected to behave like a 10-year-old. Yes, I can have the most stimulating and insightful conversations with him but he’s still just a baby. Sometimes the things he says makes me stop in my tracks and say, “Wow, this kid is smart.” But he also wants to run and jump and climb and make noise like a normal kid his age.
While he enjoyed the museum, I realize that he can’t and won’t behave for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time (unless he’s in the children’s discovery area). Maybe that’s why they have so many benches sprinkled throughout the museum so that you can take frequent time outs.
Parenting is a learning process and thankfully, we get to practice daily. While it’s noble of me to want to take him with me everywhere that I go, I have to realize that sometimes if it’s something that I am really interested in I can save myself a great deal of frustration if I go alone. There will come a day when he will be able to stay still for more than five minutes and when that day comes then we will be able to do all the things I have been dreaming about. But for now, it really is all about him.
See also:
How Do You Want to be Remembered?