Sometimes I feel life is a cacophony of unharmonious tunes and melodies.This week has been just that. It may seem like a lot of ranting and venting out and a whole lot of words to read. But stay with me and I shall tell you why I am writing this.
The last fortnight has been a frenzied ride in the most superlative sense.The curtain has fallen on the school’s summer break for Ruhaan. The daily morning routine has weaned back into our systems…oh finally! After several snoozing sessions and zillion innovative ways of cajoling Ruhaan to get out of bed, it has finally crawled its way back into our systems (RIP late night shenanigans).
Another marker why I call the past few days frenzied is because we finally concluded some major renovations in our house this last week. Happy to announce, the leaking roof in our makeshift play room has been fixed (silent prayer)!
Now a minute of some serious crying my heart out to you….
The renovation rule was simple: Old roof off, new roof on. But hey, we forgot to bribe the rain Gods!The day the old roof was stripped off and the new one was to be laid, in those wretched 30 minutes, the rain Gods lashed out! So while the room (actually the kid’s play room ornated with toys, strollers, slide, trampoline and you know the stuff that I am talking about) stood bereft of a roof, open under the dark clouds, the downpour started. At that time my brain shrunk to the size of a mustard seed. With pelting rain drops drenching my body and soul, I managed to transport most of the stuff to the other part of the house. And then I waited, waited for the rain to abate before I deployed the forces (me, me and me) to clean the almost inundated room. You must be wanting to reach out and hug me right?! Thanks but hold it….there is more to the drama of my life.
Yes!Oh yes! Every woman’s nightmare and my reality. The house help gave me no notice and left!! Sad circumstances for her, and sadder for me! Needless to say, it has been a mad past few days. Though I’ve managed to recover (brave face here) with the help of some serious counseling and support from my husband, I didn’t want this Sunday to be a beat up Sunday scoring socially required brownie points.
I didn’t want a beat up Sunday. I wanted to laze as a parent, simply sit there and share happiness with my family. So here’s what hubby and I did this Sunday. We made it a Sunday of Lazy Parenting.
Lazy Parenting Idea 1# – Lots of free play for kids
So while we ensured that the kids were safe, we didn’t care about what they did with their toys, or the house! We spent a lazy morning playing ‘Marco Polo’ at the pool, ran around a bit in the rain and came home to spend the rest of the morning watching the kids play with empty cardboard boxes, pillows, blankets and loads of other ‘not toy’ things.
Boxed up!
Lazy Parenting Idea 2# -Let them stay hungry
While Inaaya finished her meal with zero effort, Ruhaan decided to be choosy about what should’ve been on his plate. And I decided to be unconcerned. Post a few fruitless whining efforts, he served himself his meal and devoured it. I have to add, he ate it inside his make believe house (yes, yes….the carton!) All this while hubby and I sat together seeing Inaaya waddling around the house measuring its length and babbling ‘appa, mama, papa, sheesshhh!.’
Eating in one box and out of another! Boxy affair
Lazy Parenting Idea 3#- We said yes to the ‘TV’
As if the kids don’t watch television! The important thing here is discretion and sensible viewing. As long as we adhered to these strictly, we were happy. We have on our external hard disk , a list of cute animated movies and some educational listings. We don’t encourage any fast paced or action viewing for Ruhaan, but we can certainly make peace with him watching certain things. This afternoon, it was Madagascar. While Inaaya took her afternoon nap and Ruhaan was engrossed in Alex’s trapezing antics , hubby and I spent the afternoon wallowing in the glory of nothingness.
Lazy Parenting Idea 4# – Yay to pizza and ice-cream!
While I know that it is not in the interest of my children to feed them junk food I am not naive to deprive them the joys of pizza and ice-cream. Here again, there is utmost judiciousness about when and how I allow Ruhaan this indulgence. So while I cooked a whole balanced Indian meal for lunch (get ready for this), I was not going to do anymore cooking this evening. I wanted to be a lazy parent and allow myself and my kids to pile on some junk calories. We packed Inaaya’s home cooked meal (certain mommy things are ingrained in me and I cannot just feed my 13 month old pizza yet!) and went out for pizza followed by some amazing ice-cream!
Fam-bam over pizza and ice-cream and LO loving her first taste of chocolate ice-cream!
Ending with the beginning…..the reason why I wrote this? To let all mom’s out there know how wonderfully liberating it feels to allow yourself to be a LAZY PARENT!
At the end of the day, we were all happy. Did I corrupt my kids? Not at all! Lazy parenting didn’t mean we were uninvolved or careless about what our kids did. It simply meant that we decided a change in parenting paradigm for that day. It also didn’t mean that the house rules didn’t apply. It just meant that within those set of fixed rules, we as parents were choosing to be flexible and exercising some levels of freedom.
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