A Week of No Complaining: Day 5 & Day 6

Day 5: Doing better about not complaining. Whining seems to be a habit for me. It helps not to be PMSing this week or have no real problems with the kids. The teen did not make it to school on time for reasons he though valid. We, his parents did not share his view. Instead of fighting with him, I just repeated twice why he doesn’t get the car this weekend. (And threatened to take it next weekend, which is his girl’s friends prom weekend.) But I did not complain about his behavior after our conversation. I really do have less to say, so this has helped me realize how much my complaining has drowned out communication with my kids. My ESSV was gone all day yesterday so I was self- regulating!!

Day 6 Almost done. Tomorrow is the last day of the Week Of No Complaining. For some reason yesterday my blog would not enable comments and had that weird widget. But I am not complaining…yet.

When you can't complain, you wind up more focused on the problem and not how you feel about the problem. Interesting insight!

The comment problem seems to have resolved itself.

I am offering a contest (inducement) to e-card users, leave a comment 1 entry, write a post and link either in a comment . Twitter, tweet, facebook, stumble etc 2 more enteries, just leave a comment telling what you did. 2 lucky randomly chosen winners will get 500ec’s each. All entrants will get a shout out link in a summery post next week.

Parenting Teens: The Modern Teen Connection

A friend mentioned that her family uses four cars to run their lives. I though that was a little excessive until I realized we have 3 cars and pay about a third of the insurance on a fourth.(Maybe even less than a third, that particular semi-adult is becoming more adult and less semi).

Between all of us, we have 5 cell phones, one land line and two extensions, 5 computers of one type or another, 2 TVs (small by modern standards or so we have been informed, either of them hang from the wall), Tivo on one of them, 2 games systems and a separate not hooked up to anything smallish TV for the game systems (we are sadly uncool in the game systems department), at least 3 MP3 players floating around, several CD players and at least one digital camera.

All the children have Facebook accounts, multiple personal e-mail accounts, and one has her own blog. Another is running out of computer space for her schoolwork because of all the songs she has stored. The term external hard drive had been mentioned in my presence. I asked if her computer had a delete function. I remain a sadly uncool parent. I have three active e-mail accounts myself!

Our children do not see us at the epitome of electronic/car blessedness but as a decidedly underpowered family. I am kinda stunned to see all the stuff we use just to communicate, travel or to entertain ourselves.

My parents reared a passel of kids with two cars (even though mom didn’t drive), one phone with two extensions…..that’s pretty much it.

Oh I forgot two TVs (with cable) and some tape recorders and later cassette players. I think there might have been a stereo or two also.

I have no idea how my parents managed.