Plan to Change your Plans

Whether you are a newly expectant parent or have a black belt in adolescent psychology, one of the most important traits you will need to cultivate in raising children is flexibility. This is not to say that it isn’t wise to go ahead and plan and prepare for a life centered around your little or big bundle of joy, but you can save yourself a lot of frustration by simply adjusting your expectations if you find that they are too rarely being met. While I am a big fan of ambition, there's something about mixing it with parenting that seems to always backfire in my face.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not an advocate of Murphy's Law Theory, or anything. I find it a little pessimistic for my taste, and though I am no Zen master, one of the greatest rewards parenting has given me, is the ability, or maybe the tendency, to stay "in the now" a little more readily—which, I have found, is a pretty pleasant place to be. Maybe it's because the responsibilities of parenting loom large. So much can go wrong, and some things will, but it seems that when I forget all the worrying that inevitably accompanies overwhelming baby poop and teenagers who drive, I am better able to do what is right before me. If you haven't heard, parenting can be browsergames charts extremely challenging, mentally and physically, and yet some have even chosen to do it more than once.

Someone once told me that a woman's waking up every few hours during late pregnancy is an evolutionary adaptation that helps her to not turn into a she-bear every time her baby wakes her with his or her wet diapers and need to feed, only to wake up thirty minutes after finally falling back to sleep, needing comfort for a gassy belly. While I don't think this is a well-tested theory, there is something to the idea that the unique ability to sleep quite fluidly, in and out in little sleeping spurts, does seem to come with the territory. My point? Be patient with yourself. You're bound to fall short here or there. We all do… and then we adapt.