This blog post is from the Parenting in Real Life Podcast episode – Finding Good in 2020. You can read the highlights here or listen to the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
parenting in real life moment
Our real life parenting moment this week is from our sweet little Lucy. I had braided my oldest daughter’s hair and she undid it so her hair was curly. Lucy wanted her hair to look like her sister’s hair. She wanted to have “noodle hair” too. So now we call curly hair, noodle hair. We felt like that was a fun way to describe it.
a product we’re loving
A product we’re loving right now is our… mechanical pencil sharpener. We’ve had those little plastic hand held ones forever and they always seem to break the lead right when you get to a point or only sharpen one side of the pencil. We did a quick search and for less than $20 we bought a mechanical pencil sharpener and it’s AMAZING! Our kids will even break pencils just so they can sharpen it. Such a little thing that makes a big difference. If you want to check out the pencil sharpener we got, this is our Amazon Affiliate link. You won’t be sorry. A win for 2021 already.
finding good in 2020
At the end of the year, I noticed a lot of people being grateful 2020 was over, but also a lot of people expressing how important it was to look back at the year and to find what they learned or finding good in 2020 that came from such a hard time. I thought this was a great idea to reflect on that.
So Alan and I discussed some of the good things we experienced in 2020 and wanted to share them with you because maybe you had some of these same experiences too. If you haven’t had a time to think about last year, our challenge for you is to come up with your own list of 10 good things that came out of 2020. This allowed us to feel a little more hopeful about 2021 too. We can do hard things! So here’s our list of finding good in 2020.
- We learned the strengths and weaknesses of our kids at school with distance learning. We were able to get a better insight to what comes naturally and what they struggle more with. Now I know where to spend a little extra time when helping them learn and study.
- Homeschool is not for us. I thought about homeschooling a bit before the pandemic happened. I have a degree in Elementary Education and felt like there were some other things that I wanted to teach my kids and homeschooling would give us that time. Distance learning is not the same as homeschooling, but I quickly learned that some of my kids do NOT like me being their teacher. Question answered.
- Our kids learned how to play better together. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still a lot of fighting, but at one point they could only play with each other so if they wanted to play, they had to play together and they seemed to find some games and interests that they can do well together.
- I’m not afraid of school breaks anymore. I always dreaded spring break, Christmas break, and even summer break with all the kids home and schedules thrown out the window. But with 6 months of everyone being home, the breaks we had after that seemed like no big deal.
- We like Alan working from home. He’s still working from home and when he does get to go back to work, we hope it’s a hybrid of working from home and at the workplace because it works well for him to be here. And gives me a little freedom to leave when I need someone to watch the kids at home.
- Our daughter got baptized with her 2 cousins who live in Texas. In our church, we get baptized at 8 years old. Our daughter has 2 cousins who also turned 8 in 2020, but their baptisms got postponed because of the pandemic. When things eased up a bit in the summer, we decided to have all 3 kids baptized together in Utah. That wouldn’t have happened if life had been normal. That was definitely a silver lining for us.
- We started going on short dates with our daughters babysitting. This is a big milestone for our family. We’ve always dreamed of our kids being able to babysit themselves and we’re almost there! We put the younger kids to bed and the oldest two watch TV. We’re only gone a short time, but this has been really fun for us to connect more on date night.
- We ran a 12K. The actual race got canceled, but we ran it anyway with some family members on our trip to the family cabin in Idaho.
- We walked together in the morning when it was warm. Now that it’s cold, I’ve opted out of outdoor walks, but we loved having that time to chat, just the two of us, since Alan didn’t have to go into work early.
- We potty trained our youngest during the day. This is big! We’re almost done with diapers! Lucy wears a pull up at night right now, but during the day we are golden!
There’s are list of 10 things that were good for us in 2020. What good happened to you?