Chelsey's Parenting Toolkit

I had an appointment with my counselor recently where we spent most of the hour talking about parenting, at my request. I don’t know if was the intensity of the end of the school year or the current ages of our kids or the age gaps between our kids. Maybe it’s just that we have four kids and four is not a small number of people to be responsible for, but parenting has been hard lately. I have been wondering if I have been making parenting harder than it has to be.

Her answer was yes and no. Yes, because I have some things I’ve been doing that are not helping my kids or me. No, because parenting is just not easy. One conclusion we reached is that I have been focusing really unhelpfully on all the ways that I perceive that I am failing as a mom. As we talked, she pointed out things that we’ve done with our kids that have been really good, and she encouraged me to think about some of those things in order to rebuild some of my confidence in my parenting.

What follows is an extremely rando…