Beautiful Park

Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. ~ Colossians 3:21

"Remember? We are not to exasperate our children, honey." This has become one of my many sayings lately as I watch my two sons and their father wrestle sometimes to the brink of someone getting upset. They all wrestle frequently and most of the time it is innocent, out of love and they are just having a good time. I've learned to back off, but sometimes one of them (usually one of the boys; not my knight) will get upset and the other two have a slight tendency to push them a little, or "egg" them on. Anytime it's one brother to another I say, "Quit it!" but if it's my husband, my newest moto comes flying out of my mouth. Then it happened. The day I was told the same thing by my heavenly groom...."I didn't mean that only for fathers, Janine." What? My son had been bouncing off of the walls all morning long and had come to me with strange requests all morning long also. "Can I fill dad's rubber gloves up with water to see how much they can hold?" NO! "Can we make cookies this morning?" NO! "Can I give my stuffed animals a bath?" NO! Then here he came again and, of course, while I was busy! Inevitably he always asks me things when I'm in the middle of doing something that I think is important. "Can we go to the park?" N - wait a minute, I'm getting something "YOU'RE DISCOURAGING YOUR SON!" What happened? In just a few seconds my perspective changed and I heard it, "It's not just for fathers, Janine. You are embittering and discouraging your son also when you don't take the opportunity to play with him; which is part of serving me." You see, I had always read that scripture to mean that we are not to make our children unnecessarily angered. Well, yeah! HELLO! That's exactly what I was doing. That's exactly what I do a lot of the time. I make them UNNECESSARILY angered because I don't feel like I have the time for their requests. At that moment I realized that needed to change in me and I prayed that it would. One of my New Years goals is to be more of a spontaneous mother and here I was saying no to everything when really, what does it hurt to stop and bake cookies with my four year old? What's the difference between frustrating my children with my Noes when they could be Yeses as opposed to frustrating them any other way? Let's face it, sometimes I'm going to discourage them because there are indisputable NO answers, but if it can be a YES, then why not? So, moms, let's be a little more spontaneous and stop discouraging our children by not giving them the attention they deserve. Granted, it's not always going to be possible, or easy, but it can be so rewarding! When we can we need to be more encouraging instead of discouraging to our children. By the way, it was a beautiful day at the park! ~