Be a fun Mom

I tend to worry alot and also deal with depression, have chrons disease and i am a recovering drug addict that has 2 boys, ages 20mths and almost 4 year old. I know that I am not fun to be around and i want to learn how to be fun to where my kids and i can enjoy being around me!

Today I made cookies, from scratch (no cheating with the dough-in-a-tube), with my four-year-old.

And even though we accidentally used twice the salt,
And even though he licked his hands intermittently while patting cookies onto the baking sheet,
And even though the recipe called for whole wheat flour and we only had Regular Old flour,

They turned out great and we ate them all YUM!

To have great memories of fun & zany stuff their mom did with them. That is why, this morning, I made homemade play-doh with my four-year-old…two colors, no less…

THEN… we built a volcano with it,
THEN… we filled the hole with baking soda
THEN… I let him pour a tablespoon of vinegar into the hole, so the volcano would ERUPT!!

Got my Fun Mom star today, didn’t I?
;-)

There. Now I’m done. Leave me be. ;-)

I had a good childhood, (it feels tainted now so what would of been great is just good, but still it was a good childhood) and if I think back I think of all the fun things that we did as a family and all the places we went etc and I want that for daughter (I want a lot for her but that is another story!).

As a family we eat together, we put the shopping away together, we garden together, we go for walks together, we colour or play with play doh together, we go to the park together, we play with our cats together, we laugh together, we pray together.

We read together everyday and go to the Library each week to stock up on new books. We can get 15 books out each on our tickets and we take full advantage of that! It is great as at three years old she is starting her journey in reading and with the number of libraries round here I doubt we will ever run out of books!

Every week without fail (well unless one of them is ill) she and her Dad go swimming and she loves that so much and always says about the fun she has.

So I had to think of something we could do that was cheap and fun and I thought about the cinema! Every Saturday morning our cinema shows a selection of children’s films (maybe two or three months old) and the ticket price is £1. £2 for us to sit in the dark, sharing popcorn and candy and a drink making memories is great value!

So far (three weeks in) we are having a ball with it – we go for a walk before and after so that we don’t get fat from eating sweets (her idea as much as mine!) and talk about the things we have seen and our week.

Last night though I realised that I had found our thing when she had woken in the night and I was sitting next to her bed…

“I am proud of you, you know”
“Even when I am naughty are you still a little proud of me?”
“Yes”
“I am proud of you too Mummy”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you make it all fun… you are a funny Mummy!”

I am a Funny Mummy and proud of it!

My kids and I have a lot of fun together, but there are a lot of days where they probably don’t think I’m so great, like when I’m just being lazy and don’t give them special attention. I want to focus on being more fun – fun all the time, or at least most of the time. I love getting to know my kids more everyday, and having fun with them is the best way to do that. I want to be so fun to them, that they don’t remember or think about those not-so-good times.

I would love for my children to grow up and always remember fun things we did. I want to give them experiences they enjoy and that make them smile when they think of them. Being a kid is such a short experience. We grow up so fast and have so many responsibilities and stresses in life. I want to keep my kids innocent and happy as long as possible, and I want their best memories in life to be of things we did together.
We go to carnivals, movies, swimming pools, play games, eat at nice restaurants, make photo albums, have garage sales, write stories together, camcord each other, get decked out for halloween. The list goes on and on. there are a lot of free things just at home that we do, and I never want it to end. I will miss my kids tremendously when they grow up!