Probably, not a blog post you foresaw coming.
Parenting teenagers, it was just an interesting topic of conversation 2 months ago with my class of mostly twenty-something year olds.
Until... 2+ weeks ago when God saw fit to skip right over the baby, toddler, and child stages and give me a teenager.
I wake her up (sometimes as late as 2:00 in the afternoon),
urge her to try and take less then an hour and a half to get ready,
fix her breakfast,
sit with her as she eats (most of it),
don't act surprised as she doesn't say thanks,
put half of her unfinished milk in the fridge,
decide to leave her plate on the table maybe she'll think to pick it up later,
stand by the door as she moves like molasses,
send her off in the micro bus shouting the final instructions about where to get off,
call her phone only to find out it's dead,
wait for her at church where she never shows up,
get home to find she has already left (the plate still on the table),
fix the same meal for myself that I fed her 10 hours previously,
drank the rest of her milk...
if these things weren't making me feel like an old mom having a guy call and ask if he could keep her out past the city wide curfew definitely did!
Ok, ok, but really I'm thankful for the situation. The Northern New Yorker girl meets Southern Charlestonian girl and besides "mom" practice I continue to learn about culture.
This challenged me to think about how on earth I would ever carry out those "ideals" I discussed just months earlier. I mean 3 weeks is something but how about years and years with no plane ticket deadline?
You will never know how thankful this made me for my mother who served me in exactly the same ways day in and day out. I have to tell you when I was siting there at breakfast with her I grabbed a card and wrote my mother a note.
I would say "Shhh, don't tell her cause it will take 2 weeks for her to get the card" but she's probably the only one reading this anyway :P
Parenting teenagers, it was just an interesting topic of conversation 2 months ago with my class of mostly twenty-something year olds.
Until... 2+ weeks ago when God saw fit to skip right over the baby, toddler, and child stages and give me a teenager.
I wake her up (sometimes as late as 2:00 in the afternoon),
urge her to try and take less then an hour and a half to get ready,
fix her breakfast,
sit with her as she eats (most of it),
don't act surprised as she doesn't say thanks,
put half of her unfinished milk in the fridge,
decide to leave her plate on the table maybe she'll think to pick it up later,
stand by the door as she moves like molasses,
send her off in the micro bus shouting the final instructions about where to get off,
call her phone only to find out it's dead,
wait for her at church where she never shows up,
get home to find she has already left (the plate still on the table),
fix the same meal for myself that I fed her 10 hours previously,
drank the rest of her milk...
if these things weren't making me feel like an old mom having a guy call and ask if he could keep her out past the city wide curfew definitely did!
Ok, ok, but really I'm thankful for the situation. The Northern New Yorker girl meets Southern Charlestonian girl and besides "mom" practice I continue to learn about culture.
This challenged me to think about how on earth I would ever carry out those "ideals" I discussed just months earlier. I mean 3 weeks is something but how about years and years with no plane ticket deadline?
You will never know how thankful this made me for my mother who served me in exactly the same ways day in and day out. I have to tell you when I was siting there at breakfast with her I grabbed a card and wrote my mother a note.
I would say "Shhh, don't tell her cause it will take 2 weeks for her to get the card" but she's probably the only one reading this anyway :P
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