Treasure of friendship

Behind our perfect exterior and can-do-it-all supermom front, there is a well of vulnerability that needs to be filled with a little love and care from time to time.

How many friends have you circled around yourself with whom you can be transparent enough to cry and admit your inabilities?  We are not perfect, but we demand perfections from ourselves especially when it come to nurturing the little lives God has entrusted us with. It becomes therefore of utmost important ace that we walk with other mothers in our journey of motherhood, and to peek into their wells of vulnerability and have them look at ours.
There is wisdom and empowerment in this
sort-of transparency.

I was blessed to have friends who came around me at the time of my most need and they have taught me some of the most needed lessons in my journey as a mom. Some have even been friends for the season - such as a parenting show, an article in the magazine, a blog on the net, or even a conversation with the nurse or a doctor. Also the ever-infront-of-you question "what's on your mind?" of facebook comes so handy for the instant help-solutions to your parenting dillemas.  It is so comforting if you are even a part of a parenting group - where you can unload your concerns in prayer and fellowship.

I have learned, through these friendships, that happy mothers raise happy children. By ensuring that we are taken care of in our
vulnerable parts, we give our children the tools to do the
same. Sweetness breeds sweetness and confidence produces
confidence. So let's not leave those wells empty, but fill them
with the good stuff with the little help from our friends.

A friend loves at all times.

(Proverbs 17:17)

~All images taken from Google Images~

Dinosaur Train - themed birthday cake

Birthdays are big deal.  

And we mothers know it.  In fact we make it a big deal! Whether you celebrate it with an enormous list of guests or you chose to keep the moment intimate, there is still a lot of planning which needs to find some time on your busy and most likely an overfilled calendar on the fridge. 

Cakes naturally take the centre of attention in this play of birthday celebrations. I remember, last year when I had to invest a great deal of time in running around to find the perfect cake. My son was at an age where he had outgrown Barney, well sort of, and he was not into spider-man enough to want a red and blue cake. Dinosaur train, however, was his favourite show at the time. He knew its songs and had its lyrics memorized. So choosing dinosaur train as a theme was an easy answer when it came to deciding on what kind of cake I should get. It sounded great and I was excited. But only until I met the real challenge. To my surprise, I couldn't find a cake with this theme in my area of hunt. 

I remember doing a lot of bakery-hopping. It wasn't until I came across a store that sold a dinosaur train card game. Yes, you read that correct, a card game not a cake. In my point of desperation, this seemed like a huge green light of hope! And of course there is no telling that I grabbed the box from the shelf quicker than I would catch my breath. With the receipt in my hand and dinosaur card game in my bag, I still had to figure out how I will turn this card game into a cake. Anyway, the adventure was undertaken and the tough got going. 

Since I had spent all my allotted time hunting for dinosaur-themed items, I actually didn't have much time for baking. And hence felt justified in cheating myself to an already baked cake from the bakery nearby. I bought the simplest kind I could get - although those are hard to find these days.  Once I took all the frills out I mixed in my blue and green icing on the cake and stuck the dinosaur pop-up cards from the card box game and bordered the cake with them. And Viola! a dinosaur-themed cake was before my eyes. My son was delighted! Needless to say his delight was priceless for me.

adventures of love...

Tiny toes and the mischief they get into...

After the awe of counting the tiny-infant-toes, the next biggest delight is the moment of actually seeing these tiny feet walk, especially if this is your first child. 

The truth, however is that in between the ohs and the awws, we find ourselves chasing these too-excited feet which have discovered both their ability and freedom. And all of a sudden the laid back and delightful 'awe' is replaced by more of an 'awe' of discovering all that can go wrong. We find these very cute feet sneaking themselves in places we had not imagined they can go. And here we thought that we had overcome the hardest part of parenting - the sleepless nights of infancy. Little did we know, that another trying phase was coming - a phase that is a constant and active chase. And when their excitement and our exhaustion is placed on a graph, they seem to play a perfect tango. 

I remember very vividly when I discovered that if I wanted to prevent hours-of-clean up and food-waste then I needed to have a lock for on my fridge door. This insight came with a hefty cost - a massive clean-up. In this phase of exploration it seems that even if you come from a generation of right-brain-genes carrier, trust me, your child will exhibit all the qualities of being a scientist. They instinctively acquire new knowledge by conducting experiments - Observe, experiment, formulate, test, test again and again and again. And this might be the only time you find yourself not so keen on their scientific-inquiry-impulses. 

Somewhere in this perfect tango, I had realized then that if I did not make an action plan and become pro-active, my children's creative juices and their first taste of self-empowerment will supersede my first taste of 'wow - you can do that' or rather 'oh-oh - not that'. If I could have afforded the luxury of a maid who would clean up all the mess made as a result of their curiosity or the riches enough to replace all the broken items, I think I would have rather enjoyed and laughed with them at their impromptu acts of exploration, as long as their safety wasn't compromised. But since I was in shortage of both privileges, I compromised somewhere in the middle. 

My solutions to handle this madness was simple: a point and shoot camera to witness the disasters, social media network to console, and lots of quicker-picker-upper-dialogues-with-self. Being equipped with all these tools, any one can brave the 'accident' stages of the toddler phase. And at the end of the day, as a survivor, when you put these tiny feet to sleep, you can seal the day with a dose of humour, a tucked-away memory and a seal of a mom's-hug.