I was looking down at my cell phone as my daughter was trying to get my attention. “Mommy! Look at what I made!” She was trying to get my approval on her drawing. I didn’t look up and murmured, “Hmm..that’s nice.”
“No, Mommy, look!” She insisted. I had no choice but to draw my eyes away from my phone and focus on her.
Sadly, I realized that this pattern had gone too long, and things needed to change. My daughter was growing fast, and these were moments that I should cherish. Plus, my behaviors are setting her up for similar patterns in the future.
My husband told me a story that he heard today about a young woman who, while cooking ham, cut off the sides before putting it in the pan. Her friend asked her why she cut the sides off, and she replied, “Well, that’s the way my mother does it.”
This prompted the young lady to ask her mother why the sides of the ham should be cut before being cooked, and her mother said, “I don’t know..that’s the way your grandmother prepared ham.”
The inquisitive woman approached Grandma with the same question, the answer she received was, “I cut off the sides because the pan I was using was too small to fit the entire piece of ham.”
In the same way, we tend to mirror patterns we were exposed to as we grew up.
I decided it was time to spend quality time with my daughter because this was a sweet window of opportunity that could easily be missed. Naming it “Girl Time”, I decided to carve out 1-2 hour(s) each week to discuss and pray about important life values, like generosity and gratefulness. We dialogue and write down practical ways to live it out.
I can’t afford to depend on her teacher or friends to guide her on such life lessons. She is a treasure that God has entrusted to me.
Is there someone in your life that desperately needs your time? Be practical and cut out things that are crowding your schedule to fit them in. Time is running out.
Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff. —Catherine M. Wallace
Our children are watching us live and what we are shouts louder than anything we can say. —Wilfred Peterson
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
~Betsy
