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A few weeks ago I wrote an entry where I talked about how I can be a big scary mommy that yells a lot, and how I wanted to try and chill the fuck out.
Ok, so I have mostly (partially) chilled the fuck out, but I have also accepted that I also come from a long line of loud talkers and sometimes my kids and I are just going to be in a vicious cycle of trying to out loud talk each other.
Here is the thing, I am ok with us all just being loud and speaking in raised voices, but what I am not ok with, is when I cross over into yelling territory. It's not cute. It's not fun. No one in the house enjoys it. It gives me a headache, and I think that I may have found my own personal best method to stay away from it, but to be honest I have no idea what I am doing or where I am going most of the time so... I am just seeing how it goes.
When I wake up in the morning and, if I am lucky, have fifteen minutes to drink my coffee alone... I say out loud, "I'm not going to yell today". When I am eventually raised-voice asking for the kids to put their shoes on for the twentieth time, I say out loud to them "I'm not going to yell today". When on the way home from school Cash and Charlie are berating me from the back seat for whatever reason, I let out a deep sigh and can hear Patience pipe up, "Mom, remember what you said this morning? Remember?" and I just say that I remember and turn the radio up instead of engaging in an altercation with the grumps.
I'm not saying that I never yell, or that I will never yell, or that other people shouldn't yell... I am just trying to work on resetting so that shouting isn't the default form of communication in the house, and I do plan on checking back in here and on Instagram to update on how its going.
In the time that I have been taking to try and adjust my own behaviors to model better ones for the kids, I have also been noticing that I kind of set my self up to be frustrated.
When the kids are with me about eighty percent of what they eat is made from scratch in the house (gluten free mac and cheese, pizzas, and tortillas being the largest exceptions), but I almost never ever ever make my life easier by prepping anything. Which means breakfast time and dinner time feel a lot like what I imagine the atmosphere of Chopped feels like, complete with the three judges.
So, a few weeks ago, with this in mind, I decided to stay up late on a Thursday night and make these chocolate chip pumpkin cheesecake muffins that I found by one of my favorite paleo bloggers. Of course I had almost every single ingredient in my pantry, but the vegan cream cheese I had to hunt down since she specified "almond". I am not vegan but I avoid all dairy that isn't grassfed, so my mind was blown when I saw what is available in the vegan section. I've been watching my own options expand, and was very excited to see that others are as well!
Long story short, Friday morning I got up, made my coffee, woke the kids up, kept everyone in a good mood for "free dress" day, came downstairs, gave them my late night muffins, and promptly listened to my kids literally gag and cry over them. GAG and cry.
And I am going to tell you right now, that I don't care for breakfast type foods but I grabbed one of those muffins up and it was perfectly fine! I'm actually sure it would be delicious if I didn't hate eating before ten in the morning. Dustin thought they were good, and the folks at work thought they were great. My kids were just being picky buttholes.
The whole reason I went into telling this story is because at seven in the morning, I was standing in my kitchen only half a cup of coffee in, in front of three protesting children refusing to eat food that we are lucky to be able to afford and that took effort to make, and I just said "I'm not going to yell today" while I ate my muffin and finished my coffee.
And I didn't yell that day.
Photo of me is by Dustin Luna @PALEMOONphotography.com
Photos of food are by my iphone (sorry)