Motherhood Tips 7
Tuesday, 23. February 2010 by Renee Ellison
Forward the link to this blog to some dear mother who never had a course in college about how to be a good mother and never read a book entitled How To Be a Perfect Mom. Send it to a mother who will “sort of get the hang of it” by the time it is all over! Motherhood is a steep learning curve. Tips help!
Parenting Tip: Can you love your child too much?
It is absolutely impossible to over-love a child! It would be like saying of the Heavenly Father, “his love doesn’t endure forever”, and “he didn’t keep his covenant of love with his people for very long”. (NOT in 2 Chronicles 6:14!)
Last week we looked at Larry Crabb’s insightful statement that every human being has two basic needs: 1) “to matter” and 2) “to be loved.” We already looked at the “to matter” part, discussing how important it is to identify, early on, your child’s natural wiring, skills and abilities. Fanning that flame is vital to letting the child know that he has real significance in the big wide world.
This week, we now look at making your child “feel loved”. We’re talking about parenting with a mature love, here. It IS possible to SPOIL your child by giving him too much materialism too early, by setting no limits and boundaries on his behavior, or by responding to his foot-stomping demands. In these cases, withholding loving feelings and actions might be a deeper love, if it is needed to teach the child responsibility, or thwarts his self-absorption. Real love aims to lead the child to higher ground.
We’re talking about a wise mature, ten steps ahead of them kind of love. This love prays for his child. This love anticipates and goes ahead of the child laying out broader and broader wholesome opportunities for the child’s own personal expansion. But also, this sort of love can be felt. A child so loved registers over and over again in his own small emotional accounting book that he has once again experienced real caring from his parents. This is a love that perhaps would:
None of us will be perfect parents, nor did we HAVE perfect parents. But look back in your own childhood at what your parents DID do right and emulate that part. Look there for clues. Ask further, of yourself, what did some other adult do to you, as a child, that made you feel really loved? Your grandparents? Your aunts and uncles? A kind neighborhood gentleman or lady? Your own friends? Recall what made you feel good and what currently MAKES you feel good, even now. Do all those big things to YOUR own child, sometime. And do the little things every day. Fill up his love bank, and he’ll love his parents back and go on to become a great friend of many others. He will have learned how to love, by experiencing it himself. Keep that account skimpy and he’ll flock to the approval of peers or the strange man hanging out at the corner lamp post.
Home Management Tip: Linen enhancement
Once we met a woman who told us her career was working in Linen Enhancement. Having never heard of such a career, we probed further. She laughed and said that she did laundry for the hotel we were in!
So, how can we enhance those linens…manage THAT department better?
RE: bedding, work toward having two sets of sheets for each bed, even if you have to start with thrift store ones. Since your children sleep in pajamas, you only NEED to change their sheets every OTHER week, changing their pillow cases weekly.
When you DO change sheets, try to make it a habit to re-make the beds with the clean set right away, when your energy levels are highest. If you delay to put the clean set on, often it gets put off til bedtime when everyone is far more cranky and have way less energy to face it. Later in the day, after you’ve finished the laundry, put your freshly laundered set of sheets back in the linen closet. This ensures that you are always rotating your sheets, not wearing out one set more than another.
When thinking about your sheet purchases try to color coordinate the sheets with the size of bed, and designate different shelves, in your linen closet, marked for each size bed. Sheets that have some blue in them might be for the single beds, the cream colored ones for the double beds, etc. that way you don’t have to unfold every sheet to figure out which bed it is for.
Airing out beds every morning is a good idea. Toxins are eliminated every night, through respiration as we sleep, so in the morning throw back the covers clear to the bottom of the bed, air the room out with fresh air, and make the beds up after breakfast. Have your children learn to air out their jammies, too, before stuffing them back in a drawer all wadded up. They can be taught to lay them over a chair or the bed near the window, neatly, til after breakfast.
Kitchen Tip: Coping with grease
Whenever you have to clean up a greasy pan, it gums up your pipes, lines your sink with an oily film, and if you have to debone any meat, it makes you have to wash your hands about six times that day to thoroughly get rid of it off your skin. You’ll end that problem forever, if you’ll do two things.
One: Whenever deboning a turkey or chicken use those cheap, very thin, see through vinyl surgical gloves! Purchase the latex free 100 count package, so that you always have them “on hand!” Because you now aren’t worried about the grease on your hands anymore, you can really attack that bird getting off every scrap ! The money you save in gaining more meat will pay for the gloves! And, not surprisingly, you’ll discover that you’ll finish the job in half the time!
Two: Immediately, take the bird out of the pan and set aside to debone later, pour the grease out of the pan, into a see-through glass jar, using a spatula to get it all. Then use a tissue to wipe off both your spatula and bottom of your pan, before tossing your pan into your sudsy dishwater. Add one or two Tablespoons of white vinegar to your water…let pan soak and go debone your bird. The vinegar will cut the tiny bit of grease that is left in your pan and help cut it off your sink and pipes as well. (By the way, wipe off your peanut butter knives with a Kleenex, too, before washing them. It will save the other dishes from a greasy film, save your pipes, and make your total dishwater less oily.)
Put your jar of meat juice/fat/grease into your refrigerator with a lid on it or saucer over it. Wait to have your gravy TOMORROW. By that time all the fat will have hardened to the top, which you now scrape off into the trash can, leaving perfectly greaseless, healthy yummy meat juice to use with your leftover meat as gravy or to use as soup stock. If you simply must have gravy on the first day that you cook your meat, use Imagine’s Creamy Portobello Mushroom Soup for your gravy. This method of managing grease is a gift to your health AND your kitchen pipes.
Return to your pan—it will now be a pleasure to wash up.
Sewing Tip: Sew higher!
A nice high surface will save you from endless back pain, while working on cutting out fabric, and/or pinning your work to prepare each section of your project for the machine. You can buy inexpensive, plastic heavy duty bed leg risers, but use them underneath the legs of your kitchen or dining room table, instead. I lift up one end of the table, and shove them under with my foot, and then go around and lift up the other end and do the same thing. To take them off, I kick them out from underneath, as I again lift first one end of the table and then the other.
And/or elevate your ironing board up higher, to make IT into a high table, by sliding a six inch high box under each leg. Choose a large-surfaced strong box made of cardboard, tupperware or sterlite, to give a sufficient base to your ironing board legs so they don’t fall off. The instantaneous added height is wonderful to work on, bringing your pinning/measuring/cutting jobs up closer to your sight, allowing you to stand up straight.
Marriage Tip: The grass is not greener
We know a lady in our city who has been remarried at least four times, that we can count…it may be five or six. She is now in her 60’s, and seasoned. With a dry wit, she is forever telling crazy stories about husband number one, or three, or? The other day, after one of those stories, my husband asked her what she had learned through all of these relationships about marriage that she could tell others. She responded, looking over the top of her glasses, with words to the effect of… “stick with the first one and work out your problems with THAT one. You only exchange one set of problems for another, and you take your OWN problems with you!”
So rumor has it, “there ain’t no grass any greener than in your own back yard.”
Devotions: Divine markings
Teach your children to write and underline in their Bibles! You can be the example, by underlining in yours, too. Teach them to treat their Bible like a life training handbook, underlining favorite verses, which they can find again QUICKLY, when they want to show them to others.
In the beginning, not only read to your children from storybook Bibles, but choose Bibles for them to finger, hold and read on their own, with larger print, and lots of pictures to prime the pump. You’re trying to help establish a lifetime HABIT in your child, here. So whet the appetite with bigger and easier Bibles at first, before they advance to harder versions.
What is the point of possessing a gold-leafed Bible and a brass heart. Chewing the Bible all up, and dog-earing it, will put the gold in yours and their hearts! In concentration camps, believers even aggressively ripped up Bibles and gave each other ONE page to live on!!! A heavily worn and torn Bible is a beautiful Bible.
This is a book that is alright to write in sideways and upside down! Both you and the children can add stars, exclamation points, boxes, and arrows! When that Bible falls apart, go to the thrift store and get another one. My current used Bible cost one dollar. Yet I go for gold in it like a black faced miner. Teach them to hunt for the little nuggets. Blah, blah, blah…NUGGET, BINGO, underline, ...blah, blah, blah, NUGGET, BINGO, underline!!!