childlike

zenhabits is one of the blogs I read occasionally (and one that makes me feel a little inadequate because they seem so all-together). Today I was reading a post about being childlike and it made me realise how lucky I am to have children. To have the opportunity to experience the world through their eyes and minds is a magical thing and a rare gift.

It is a wonderful thing that after a hard day at work I can come home and, within a few minutes, my mood is transformed - sometimes by the simplest comment from one of my children.

Of course it doesn't always last and (usually around bed time) things start to be a little less rosy. But those moments of joy far out-weigh any of the other issues and there's nothing that is ever so bad that it can't be solved with a cuddle and a giggle.

At lease when emotions turn on the spot so quickly they can just as easily turn back again. I think that's one of the best things about kids - despite their seeming complexity they manage, in a way, to help keep us parents simple.

practicing parenting

I want to be good at this thing (the parenting thing - it'd be nice to be good at the blogging thing too, but you can't have everything). I read a lot - books and blogs and articles - I talk to other parents, heck, I even talk to my wife about it and sometimes we agree (actually, luckily, we agree on most of it). And the more I read the more confused it all becomes.

Thankfully the conclusion I've come to is that most other people feel the same way I do.

In the beginning I read a lot of books about parenting. Some were really good, some were intimidating and some were down-right frightening. After our daughter was born I read more and started frequenting some parenting forums. I found some parenting blogs, too (there are one or two listed in the blog roll over there ->).

It was hard, in the beginning. It seemed as though everyone else had all the answers and was so much more together with this parenting thing than I ever was - or dreamed I ever could be. The advice in the books seemed all well and good in theory but something in my practice clearly left a lot to be desired.

Finally it was a day out at the local playground, watching other parents (many of them, let's be honest, dads) wrangling their children with such widely varying degrees of success and frustration, to make me realise that I was not alone. That 99% of the parenting world are stumbling along, making it all up on the spur of the moment and feeling that everyone else is so much better at it than you are.

I still feel that I could do it so much better and I think our second child is going to be so much more well-adjusted than the first because we've managed to iron out a lot of the kinks in our parenting approach and honed our skills on our first child.

But now I know not to sweat it.

Too much.

little miss communication

Writing these posts was a response to a challenge suggestion by a friend after some chat one day. The next day I read a post he made on his own blog about something I had said and it made me think about the effects our words have on others.

The most innocuous things we say can have the most profound effects. Things we say in jest or as a "throw-away" can be interpreted or heard very differently by the person we're talking to. Sometimes I think it'd be better if all communication was written - that way there'd be plenty of time to write, draft, re-write and so on so as to make sure that our message was heard in the way we intended it to be.

I know that my own emotions at the time have a lot to do with the way I hear and interpret what someone else is saying. We can never really know exactly what is going on in someone else's head and what they are thinking, and the words of others' are always skewed by our own understanding and experiences.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where everyone always understood everyone else clearly?

a challenge

First post on a long road...

A friend of mine came for a visit. He works in online media and I asked him about blogging. I told him that I'd often started blogs but never gone anywhere with any of them. I just never could find the inspiration to write. Plus, I always felt as though it was more of a personal diary as I figured no-one would be reading anyhow. Finally, I could never really settle on a topic.

He told me he once set himself the challenge of writing a blog post every day for two months and suggested I do the same. That by the end of it I would be thankful I'd started and would find my blogging mojo.

Well, challenge accepted. I don't know about the mojo, but here we go. Now I just have to get brave enough to let people know that I've started so that I've got the impetus to continue.

OK -  first post done.