It's been an unforgivably long time since I've posted. Life has had a way of seriously keeping me down for the past several months.
Taking care of a family of 5 with little to no help is exhausting. I really appreciate that The Husband works long hours and provides for us financially, but parenting alone for extended periods of time is really eating away at my sanity.
Of course, it doesn't help that I also got to recently discover that some friendships are only as deep as my pocketbook...and since we're in a seriously tight spot financially, I'll leave it to your imagination to decide where those "friends" have gone.
My writing has been sorely neglected, just like most of the rest of my life. I clean during most nap times and after the kids have finally stopped fighting sleep and gone down for the night (which rarely happens before midnight), and I can't manage to keep everything at an acceptable level of cleanliness for an entire day.
My main focus these days is finding a way to balance my dwindling patience with parenting a toddler. I've immersed myself in gentle/positive parenting Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. I know that I want my children to grow up to be more than mindlessly obedient little drones who are constantly seeking approval and acceptance. It's tough, though, because I often find myself falling back into the familiar.
I don't have a lot of support outside the internet. My husband isn't entirely on board with the idea of parenting gently and respectfully, most of my family doesn't get it at all, and it's really more difficult to treat my children like individuals than like property that I can control.
What are your favorite gentle parenting resources? How do you cope with spirited/high needs toddlers without losing your cool? How do you handle people who just don't "get it"?
My favorites lately are:
Aha Parenting
Positive Parenting: Toddlers and Beyond
I also have a profound amount of respect for Jeremy and Jessica Martin-Weber over at Beyond Moi. They have posted about choosing gentle parenting, and I absolutely loved the posts: Beyond Yelling and Why We Stopped Spanking Our Children.
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