Well, parenting is never easy and one hard thing to do is to nurture. Really. It doesn’t just mean being nice. When your child creates something, you can’t fix it to satisfy your own standards. You may as well be saying, “You are NOT good enough”. And you’d never say that. I know how you are. I say this so that I can explain why I have foam cat cutouts on the cats’ food dishes and lots of handwritten (and creatively spelled!) signs around my house. (Yes. They are taped. To the walls, doors, mirrors, windows…..) I prefer to think my child is developing her sense of style and contributing to the decor in our home. She is exploring the new written world and she has tools now, baby!
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I cannot say enough good things about writing your thank you notes! My children do, of course, grumble a bit about having to do it. But I believe I’ve achieved some goal when I overheard a conversation between two of my children. My oldest child advised the youngest, “You’re wasting time arguing. Mom always wins, so you may as well just get on with it.” That was a satisfying parental moment.