Category: Kids/Parenting

Tips, tricks and adventures in parenting two kids.

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Kids/Parenting Fulfillment

Planning to fail

Don’t forget to enter the Five Years From Now Blogoversaryfestathon Group Writing Project! And happy anniversary, Ryan!

In church on Sunday, one of the speakers was talking about what a difference a good attitude makes. He used an example from a Primary (children’s Sunday School) manual, which I’m way too lazy to try to find, so I’ll just paraphrase:

You’re moving and you’re afraid you won’t have any friends. How would having a poor attitude affect you in this situation? A good attitude?

The speaker left the hypothetical at that, but as I sat there, I thought through my answers.

  • Poor attitude: you’re pessimistic about making friends, so you assume that people you meet wouldn’t want to be friends. You don’t go out of your way to meet people. When new people meet you, you’re shy or just plain unfriendly, and they can tell you don’t expect to make friends.
  • Good attitude: you’re confident you’ll be able to make friends. You introduce yourself to everyone you see, you put yourself in situations to make new friends, you bring neighbor gifts around, and you look for people you can form long term friendships with. People see how friendly you are and return the gesture.

Rachel being super positive!!!!!!!!Your attitude can really dictate your reality. Both having a good attitude and a poor one become self-fulfilling prophecies. Having a poor attitude leads to self-defeating behaviors, while having a good attitude helps you come up with strategies to cope with the challenges coming.

At least half the time, I wake up in the morning already behind. My two older children are already up watching cartoons or playing on the computer, and the baby is crying for me to come get her. I’m not nearly rested enough, and I can just see the patterns of too much screen time, impatience and bickering starting to take shape.

But maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can stop the downward spiral before it starts. Some strategies to cope when I’m already starting behind would include:

  • Prayer.
  • Plan. Come up with a fun activity at home or out and about, so you have something to do instead of veg in front of the TV.
  • Eat well, maybe planning out meals and snacks for you and your kids. This sounds a little unusual, but catch-as-can grazing throughout the day contributes to that feeling of being out of control for me.

As I was drafting this post, I also came across a post by Jen from Conversion Diary on our steps for starting your day the right way—and she started out even further behind than I usually do.

What do you think? What difference does a positive mental attitude make? How do you cope when you feel like you’re starting from behind?

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Kids/Parenting MetaBlogging Fulfillment

Five years from now

It’s hard to imagine my life five years from now. Five years ago, I’d been married for two years, I was one year out of school, I had one little baby, I worked from home in Internet marketing and I started a blog.

Now I’ve been married for almost seven years, and we have three kids. I’m still blogging, though I have to admit I’ve really dropped off from time to time. I blogged professionally for a long time writing about Internet marketing news and became something of an expert, but for the last year I’ve been able to just focus on my family. I’ve begun writing fiction again, after a long break starting in college. I’ve started a writing craft blog by myself and a craft blog with my sisters. I think I’ve had several more blog ideas come and go in the mean time, but so far these are sticking.

The reason I started this blog was to help me appreciate motherhood more, to help myself and others find fulfillment in a calling I believe to be the most important thing I could do with my life right now—but which was also alternately boring and overwhelming. I wanted to be able to help other mothers feel good about a choice to stay home with their children, even though it can be long stretches of dull, hard work between the few glittering moments.

Sometimes my personal journey goes well, and sometimes it’s still rough. I think if you’d asked me five years ago, I would have told you I’d have everything figured out by now—but I think learning to be happy and grateful and content and fulfilled is a lifetime endeavor, and even if I have to take two steps forward and one step back, even if I can’t see the progress a lot of the time, even if I still struggle, as long as I keep these efforts in mind, rely on my MamaBlogga Group Writing Projectfaith and don’t let myself get too discouraged, I’ll make it—maybe not in the next five years, but I’ll be closer every day I make the effort.

My entry in the Five Years From Now Group Writing Project

What do you think? Where will you be in five years? Share your entry in the GWP today!

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Kids/Parenting

Welcome to Chez Beck

The winner of the Tom & Drew Boys Giveaway is An Ordinary Mom! Send me your address and I’ll pass it along!

Rebecca loves imagination play. She’s pretended to be Sully from Monsters, Inc. (“Suwwy”), Buzz Lightyear, and Bolt. (No idea why she tends to pick male main characters.) But lately her play has centered around “my west’aunt!” Chez Beck is set up in Hayden’s room (where Rebecca sleeps until Rachel’s ready to share a room). She’s taken to very carefully laying out each and every kitchen toy she has. But on Sunday she developed a new innovation in restaurateurism:


That would be tables.

What kind of fun pretend games do (or did) your kids like?

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Kids/Parenting

Okay, this is mostly for me.

My kids LOVE Phineas and Ferb (“Feess an’ Ferm” as Rebecca calls it). And Ryan and I like it too—but Saturday’s new episode was extra special for me.

The song in “Meatloaf Surprise” featured some of my favorite ’60s singers as the leads in Candace’s favorite band, Tiny Cowboy: Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits) and Davy Jones (The Monkees)! I even saw them in concert with Bobby Sherman as part of the Teen Idols Tour like 15 years ago.

Peter is Adrian (lead singer) and Davy is Nigel (lead guitar). Check it:

And because I know you’re wondering, yes, I really am 28.

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Kids/Parenting

Making WordPress search-engines friendly for beginners

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Set up WordPress on BlueHost

This post is aimed at beginning WordPress users. More advanced users are welcome to share tips in the comments as well. I worked in search engine optimization and Internet marketing for five years and continue to keep up with best practices.

WordPress is not bad for search engine visibility right out of the box, but there are a number of plugins that can help to enhance your blog’s search engine visibility. Several of these plugins are combined in the All in one SEO Pack plugin.

The management menu for All in one SEO Pack is located under Settings>All in one SEO. The plugin is designed to work “out of the box” for new installations of WordPress, but if you want to customize some of the aspects listed on the options page, you can do so here. Most of the boxes here are self-explanatory: click on the link (such as “Home Title”) to display an explanation of what you should and can put in each box.

Another important detail in optimizing your site is creating “canonical” URLs. This means that each unique page of your site should have only one URL that leads to it. If http://www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-post/ and http://mydomain.com/this-is-a-post/ both lead to the same page, this can confuse search engines (and users). To set a “canonical” version of your domain, you can use the Redirection plugin.

The management for Redirection is located under Tools>Redirection. Go to the Modules menu. Next to WordPress, click edit:

Next to Canonical, you can choose Leave as is, Strip WWW (yourdomain.com) or Force WWW
(www.yourdomain.com). If you want all your URLs to have the WWW, choose Force. If not, choose Strip. (Note: Strip Index is also a good idea, especially if you’re using custom permalinks.)

Finally under making your WordPress search-engine friendly, it’s a good idea to customize your permalinks (URLs). If you’re going to import a blog, be sure to set the custom permalinks before you import your old posts. Under Settings>Permalinks, set the permalinks to either date and name based or custom. Be sure to include the tag %postname% somewhere in the custom box if you select that option. For more available custom permalink tags, see WordPress’s documentation on structure tags.

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Kids/Parenting Fulfillment

Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. (psychological warfare of attrition)

It happens almost every day and almost every week. About the 18,000th sentence beginning with or consisting entirely of “Mom?”, something inside just snaps.

I know I’m not the only one being smothered with an endless chorus of requests, information, statements, status checks, questions, and, let’s be honest, stalling while a child thinks of something they wanted to say.

It doesn’t matter if there are 28 other adults in the room capable of getting that glass of water, or if Daddy is already holding the cup—seriously, I think they think every question/sentence has to begin with “Mom.” Like, it’s not grammatically complete without “Mom” in it.

(Hint: it doesn’t, and it is.)

As I’ve written this and made the lovely illustrative graphic, without exaggerating, I can safely say my kids have called my name 10 times, and asked for one nonspecific thing. My favorite was when Rebecca was sitting next to me and said “Mom . . . But, Mom. . . . But, Mom . . . But, Mom—I bettay sit atta table.”

I know they’re not purposefully trying to wear me out—it’s just a happy coincidence that I end each day three “Mom?”s away from a psychotic break.

Maybe I should stop encouraging Rachel to learn to say “Mama.”

What do your kids do over and over and over and over ad nauseam, ad infinitum, ad delirium, ad mortem?