Random thoughts and pics from last week...

Last week Josh wanted to go collect rocks. I could have taken him to the park, or the back yard for that matter, but I felt like going somewhere new so we headed up the mountains to Calico Basin. Calico Basin has a nice little picnic area and boardwalk. I imagined myself pushing Claire in the stroller while Josh ran up the boardwalk enjoying the fresh mountain air, but telling a little boy to stay on a boardwalk when he is surrounded by rocks and mountains to explore is just cruel. The mountain was too tempting, so we ditched the stroller and found an awesome little hike with lots of scrambling and plenty of rocks to collect. It was a bit of a challenge with Claire, but we had a great day and found plenty of rock treasures to fill Josh's heart's desire.

Check out mister climber:

here's a picture of Calico Basin I stole off the Internet so you can see what it looks like. There are signs all over that say "Help preserve Calico Basin, stay on the boardwalk":

I am fairly opinionated about parenting, not how others parent their children, but how I want to raise my own and the type of home environment I want them to have. Some days I doubt myself though. I see Josh throwing attitude at me that I'm sure I never threw at my parents :) and I worry that my efforts to be kind and patient with him are really just giving him leeway to be disrespectful and entitled. Then I remind myself that he is still learning, it takes time to instill values, and that none of us are perfect. Parenting is much more complicated in reality than in theory.... Last Monday was one of those days where I found myself feeling so frustrated with both of us. I was seeing this face way too often:

Wednesday was much better. He came running down with an idea, "Mom do you want to go through our stuff and see if we want to give some of it to people who don't have a lot of money?" In November we made a Thanksgiving tree. Each day we tried to write something we were thankful for and an act of service we had carried out on a leaf and glued it to the tree ( "thanks" and "giving"). For one of our acts of service we had gathered up some of our old things and taken them to Goodwill. He wanted to do this again. I felt a little conflicted as he started gather up some of his nice toys to throw in the box. I really didn't want to get rid of toys I had just bought for Christmas, but I didn't want to tell him that we only give away things we don't want. He put a new toy airplane in the box reasoning that there are only 4 people in our family and he has five airplanes. We decided to keep some of the items that Claire may want to play with when she gets older, but I decided to let him give away his toys if he wanted to. He has plenty of things and it would be better for him to enjoy giving than to keep the toys because they are new. He did decide to pull a few items out as we got closer to the drop box but most of it headed off to Goodwill.