You recently contacted me about my nomination for Mother of the Year. However, I am afraid I must decline the offer at this time. Why, you ask? Well, while I may deserve the award for making sure my son is slathered in sun block and a hat before stepping out in the sun, or for always making sure his clothes are clean and matching, or even for my All Star rendition of 3 Little Pigs at bed time, I have recently taken steps in parenting that may not be approved by the judges. Today, when Steve went to Fred Meyer for groceries, I included Disney Pixar's Cars on his list. Nothing fancy. Just Cars number 1. Evan has seen it one time (at aunt Mimi's) and LOVED it. He has numerous cars characters (all from aunt Mimi's) and had a version of the show on Steve's iPad that had the sound slightly off and subtitles. Despite the horrible version, Evan kept trying to watch it. How sad. So today, complete with a coupon for $30 dollars off a purchase of $150 or more, I told Steve to stock up on diapers and toilet paper enough to make the little show free. Now this is not the questionable parenting part. That is the good budgeting part. The questionable parenting part comes when I told Evan that he could watch Cars (the whole thing) IF and ONLY IF he ate his noodles and one bite of a chicken nugget. (Hey, it is organic!) He ate the noodles -covered with parm cheese sprinkled on by Evan himself, and then bravely grabbed the one bite I was asking him to eat. He hesitated, looked at his precious DVD sitting next to his plate and took the bite. I asked him if he liked it. "No," he replied. "Well, thanks for trying it," I said. Then, as Steve opened the packaging to the DVD, he patiently waited and then picked up the chicken for another bite! What was happening???! Steve started opening the DVD in slow motion and then proceeded to take awhile to "read the directions" before putting the show on. All the while, Evan munched down the chicken nugget that he "didn't like!" All I could think was how proud I was! My son, eating a nugget!
Long story short? I definitely do not deserve Mother of the Year. While I would like to say I do and graciously accept the award, I am pretty sure my tactics are forbidden in the big picture of Parenting for Dummies and I must decline.
However, with one wonderful chicken nugget digesting in his belly, he is lining up all the cars on the couch and had to pause the show to run grab Mater and I am still so proud of him!
3 comments:
Thanks for starting my week off with a big smile! I think the MOTY needs a good "sense of humor", so I'll renominate you!!!! By the way, if I haven't said so lately, you are a GREAT Mom!!!!
I couldn't read the whole story, I got stuck on the part that you had a $30.00 coupon to use which of course made your movie (and additional groceries) free. Of course you did.
I can tell from here that you are an awesome mom but I am with Jen . . . except I was thinking 'we never get coupons like that here :('
I hoard the $5 off a $50.00 purchase coupons like they are gold. I even annoyingly have to run and make additional selections (in fairness, often a pre-bagged and priced bag of groceries for the food shelf) to hit my $50.00 mark.
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