April, 2019

STOP what you are doing
DROP into your feelings/subconscious/intuition 
ROLL with it
Stop, drop and roll; three steps to easier parenting
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We all remember being children and being taught the life saving three chant reminder for when a fire breaks out- stop, drop and roll. Well what if I told you that our old childhood friend is still a lifesaver and can make parenting easier than you think. 

For every moment in parenting there is a point when we feel our stomaches tighten, our chest get full and our minds start to panic. In these moments what you need to do is stop, drop and roll. Stop thinking, your mind is your worst enemy. Drop, drop into your intuition, the subconscious of your parenting skills and the feelings in your body. Roll with it. You might not want your child to have blown out in the middle of a coffee shop but they did. You might need them to take a nap right now but the harder you try the more they will resist, that is the Murphys law of parenting. So, you have to roll with it and I promise you when you stop, drop and roll it will be easier, it will happen faster and it will cause less stress in your body and in your mind. I want to make something clear, following these three steps does not mean giving into your child every time they need something. There will be moments where you will stop what you are doing, drop into yourself and realize that yes your baby needs a nap and yes you have not had a sip of water or a bite of food in hours and you desperately need to pee. So in that moment rolling with it might mean grabbing a glass of water and a handful of potato chips, peeing with a screaming baby and then putting that sweet child down for a rest. Sometimes rolling with it will mean that you have to take care of you first. 

There are times when we need to stop, drop into our own needs and roll with whatever our bodies, minds, and spirit are telling us we need in that moment. At times the world will want you to be something else and unfortunately the world needs to wait because all we can do is be who we are, feel what we feel and deliver the best we can in any given moment. It will not always be perfect, it will not always be pretty but it might be exactly what we need. This does not mean that we get what we want all the time…after all we are parents now so let’s just be real. We still will most likely only achieve a fraction of what we need or want in a day, especially in the first 18 months of new parenthood but that is a separate goal and one that might be quite unrealistic. When we decide to become parents we make a choice, not because we think it will be easy or blissful every moment but because it is what we want. Most likely because we stopped and thought about what life would be like without a child and made the decision to bring them into this world. We dropped the fear and insecurity of what might happen to our body, our relationship, our life, our career and followed the passion that makes us feel whole; parenthood. We rolled with it, we tried for as long as it took, we did the treatments needed and delivered or received as best we could. It is this mentality that got us here to parenthood and with the sleepless nights, the binging on easy to find or eat foods and the mental exhaustion we have forgotten how to be the parent that we knew we could be.