stylish and honest (well, almost)
Have you seen the signs that have cropped up on Pinterest? Perhaps they’ve been other places too, but as I try not to leave my house with all the kids, and they are ALL HERE ALL THE TIME thanks to summer break, I haven’t been anywhere but on my computer lately.
I love these signs. I have several pinned on my “must create” board with the hopes that I will one day create one for my house. They say things like,
“We do hugs.
We do laughter.
We do mistakes.
We do forgiveness.
We do loud.
We do love.”
etc.
My family does all these things (some better than others). But as I was seriously considering creating one of these signs for our house, I began to wonder how honest I should be. Because while we “do loud,” it is often in the form of me yelling, “You kids are driving me crazy!!” And while we “do hugs,” they may be in disguise as headlocks, noogies, or tackles. So with that in mind, I think any sign for our family might have to include,
“We do pee-pee in grass.
We don’t do undies.
We stash empty yogurt sleeves under the couch.
We dump coke on our heads and call it being slimed.
We don’t put things away.
We watch Muppets until we can quote it forwards, backwards, in Spanish, and with commentary. (Ok, this one might be too long for the sign.)
We whine.
We watch TV standing on our heads.
We color on ourselves.
We color on walls.
We color on the TV.
We color on windows.
With that said, I’m now thinking that sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy. Perhaps I will create a sign with only our family’s best qualities instead of our family’s reality. The real head-scratcher is that some of those qualities from the “honest” list will still be on the “best qualities” list. I will let you guess which those are.
In the meantime, enjoy your family’s quirks and ridiculous-ness. Sometimes the things that drive us the most crazy are the things we love the most.
25 years ago our sign would have read:
We have no writing utensils unless under adult supervision
We wish we were as happy as other mothers seem to be at the prospect of having all children home ALL SUMMER LONG, when in fact, we are counting down the days til school starts again so that the mothership does not EXPLODE.
We pretend to do what mom asks and expects but years later the stories come out of what “really’ went on.
Today’s sign would read:
We would not take a million dollars for these memories or give a penny for any new ones.
We survived parenting and lived to tell about it….but we are war weary and honed down to a mere shadow of our “we will be the perfect parents and our children will do right and sing our praises” selves.
We will get together for holidays, birthdays, and, meet for brunch one Sunday a month at different Richmond hotspots and REALLY enjoy each other’s company and marvel at how adult-like the conversations have become and how lovely these children turned out (by our diminished standards anyway) and how accepting we have become of their individuality (including the one with many, many strange tattoos covering most of his body), and wonder how we got to this place of peace and grace and love and thankfulness.
We will look around an empty and spacious house and feel…relieved.