Posted on in Conscious Parenting, Parenting, Prejudice, Screentime, Summer Trip, Travel, Wildlife, Working Mother

An Amazing Family Summer Trip Part 2

Our second stop was Rapid City, South Dakota. We visited Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument and WaTiki Indoor Waterpark. July 4th, also, fell this week.

7/5/2023

  1. Southern South Dakota is a lot greener than I remember as a kid.  They’ve had rain or it is early in the season and all the grasses are green.  I remember miles of brown from childhood.
  2. My husband is remarkably prejudice and a number of these he has gained as his income has increased.   He even acknowledges some of them to an extent but has no desire to limit or undo them.   I have my own set also and have found it interesting in the last few years as I am acknowledging them and for some having to set aside unraveling them because I can only do so much and that is okay.   We all have prejudices, both conscious and unconscious, and I find the unconscious ones the most harmful.  For me acknowledging them, even if I don’t have the bandwidth to unravel them, reduces the harm to others and what I am passing onto my kids, or at least I hope so.
  3. Oh my god, it is tough working full time and doing childcare full time even with the older kids.  I am understanding why my two years of homeschooling during the pandemic were so stressful.  Somewhere in here, I thought there would be more time to do nothing, but all my nothing time is my job. This is enlightening because when my husband suggests, we go on vacation and I can just work while on vacation, I have a knee jerk of “No, I don’t want to do that”.  And I have a hard time explaining to him why that doesn’t work for me.  He typically has “solutions,” but they don’t work for me.   I need to plan out my responses to him when he suggests this or maybe need to draw a boundary and hold it on what I do and what he does so that we can make something like this work. I need to think about this a lot more so those conversations can be more connecting.
  4. The fireworks were freaking unbelievable.  I have never been somewhere where fireworks are legal to purchase and set off yourself. In the neighborhood where we stayed, they were and our host even said it was okay if we bought some and set them off.   We did a few.  There were fireworks going off for 2 hours and not just the little tiny ones.  It was so over the top. 
Bighorn Sheep in Badlands National Park

Our next stop was West Yellowstone, Montana. We visited Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway.

7/15/2023

  1. Yellowstone is magnificent.  If you’ve never been, go and stay for awhile.  See all the tourist things with the crowds and then get off the beaten path.  Don’t forget Grand Teton.  I wish we had more time here. 
  2. We need more space.  We ended up in a 2 bedroom hotel cabin with kitchenette and 6 people and two dogs.  Like other husbands, my husband somehow expects the kids to be silent during work hours and keeps yelling at them when they aren’t.  They are kids.   For this location, there was nowhere else to go when we were both working.
  3. Kids really don’t need screens.  We have driven over 2500 miles, and they have used the screens in the car for 4 hours total and haven’t actually asked for them too much.  They have stared out the window, listened to music, made up games, colored and only occasionally gotten too loud.  I find they are better behaved when not on screens.  (The oldest has additional screen time, and he has milked every minute.)
  4. When we stopped in St. Louis we went to our first shop with souvenirs.  3 of the 4 found something they really wanted but one was wandering the store trying to find something so he wasn’t left out.  I assured him he didn’t have to force it and could find something at the next shop.  This has led to a rotation, you can’t get something until everyone has found something from the previous round.  This came to a head today when a 7 year old really wanted to buy a stuffed animal.  However, the 12 year old had not bought something from the previous round and wasn’t with us so the answer was no.  This led to the pout face, “Come on Mom, I am so cute,” and the melting down.  I listened and emphasized with her and told her we would see the animals again at later stops.  I also realized she was likely hungry as she didn’t eat much lunch and that was 50% or more of the melt down.  Held her through being sad and off to the exhibits we went.  Biggest hit on souvenirs so far is the Dinosaur encyclopedia.  They made up an new game.
  5. Chipmunks can be aggressive. In Grand Teton at their most popular hike, one jumped on a 7 year old’s leg and started climbing up looking for a hand out. She came back down the trail in tears, scared of chipmunks. (I was behind with the slower kids so wasn’t there.) I’d be scared too. As she was explaining what happened through tears, I couldn’t understand and was in disbelief until I go to the top and saw the chipmunks. Don’t feed the wildlife.

Posted on in Conscious Parenting, Summer Trip, Travel

An Amazing Family Summer Trip Part 1

My husband loves to travel, loves the change of going or living somewhere new. I like to travel, and I like the constancy of home. Since I switched jobs several years ago and accelerated by the COVID pandemic, I am now a remote worker and not tied to an office with flexible hours. Thus, my husband wanted to travel for the summer and after some trial and error on type of trip and location, we came up with a driving tour of National Parks. As a Christmas present 2 years ago, I received a deluxe National Parks passport book and the goal to visit and stamp the 400+ sites in the book. This trip fed nicely into that goal, and I was excited about the possibilities.

I was not excited about managing 4 kids with no childcare, the packing, the travel details etc. while working full time. To help mitigate this, I decided to take intermittent vacation instead of continuous vacation. I took two days off a week throughout the trip. We had two days to do all day activities and then afternoon activities on the other days with me working mornings and evenings. We did most of our driving on the weekends to avoid taking days off of work.

During this trip, I wrote my observations of the trip for my conscious parenting group. If you are new to conscious parenting, check out Dr. Shefali Tsabary. I work with a coach who graduated from Dr. Shefali’s Conscious Parenting Coaching Institute. The coach and the group help me parent with connection and emotional intelligence rather than screaming and strict discipline. I have modified the observations to make more sense to a general audience. However, background in conscious parenting and awakening consciousness may help with understanding. Feel free to ask questions.

I may do more detailed summaries of our stops for later posts, but initially I will stick with my initial observations. We started the trip on the East coast and our first stop was St. Louis. In St. Louis, we visited the Gateway Arch National Park, the St. Louis Zoo, the St. Louis Science Museum, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site and the City Museum. We also played at Turtle Park and took a riverboat ride on the Mississippi River. Here are the observations from the week:

6/30/2023

  1. Kids don’t need all these activities we’ve planned.  The hit of St. Louis was Turtle Park, a playground down the road from our Airbnb.  The 2nd Biggest hit was the City Museum which is multiple big jungle gyms for kids.  And now they are enjoying sitting around playing D&D with each other and other games.  Still on with the activity schedule.
  2. Our society moved from corporal punishment for kids to shaming of kids to get obedience.  Where as animal training moved from corporal punishment to positive reinforcement training.  I know animals don’t have communication to allow shaming as an option, but apparently animals have more rights than our kids. I was at a NPS National Historic Site Museum (not super interesting for young kids) and watched a mom with 3 kids guessing between 3 and 10.  The middle one started crying. She asked him to stop and then took them outside when he wouldn’t.  She then stood there berating/shaming him to get him to stop crying. After a bit, they came back in without a crying child but he was emotionally detached.  And I so wanted to say, “there is a better way” but obviously couldn’t.  This is absolutely something I have done in my unconscious past and something I still do sometimes in my awakening self, so no judgement, and I was seeing how I must have looked to my kids in the moment where I am yelling and shaming them.  I also thought that if this is the interaction with others we are modelling to our children, is it any wonder our society is so screwed up sometimes. 
  3. My kids don’t like fast food, hot dogs, pizza and other typical on the go at amusement park places as much as they think they do.  They haven’t realized it, but they’ve eaten the best when we stopped at Subway or when they ordered sandwiches and salad than when we ordered pizza and hot dogs.  I wish it was easier to get vegetables on the go.
Posted on in Motherhood, Parenting, Travel

First Post – Introduction

I’ve considered writing a blog for some time. A place where I can put thoughts out into the world. I’ve been on a personal journey since I became a mother, 12 almost 13 years ago. When I became a mother, it is what I wanted, and it was so much harder than I thought is was going to be. Then, I had my second child, 10 almost 11 years ago, and I came to the conclusion that motherhood shouldn’t be this hard. I was tired, frustrated, annoyed, resentful all the time. So being a smart, driven woman, I started researching, reading, and taking courses, trying to find the quick cure to all my parenting woes. In the process, I had twins, 7 almost 8 years ago.

And that led me on a journey to where I am now. To understanding that there is no quick cure. That I have been living my life unconscious as dictated by my parental and societal indoctrination. I never questioned what I was told. If it was authority, I did it or believed it. And that in a nutshell, is what made parenting so hard. It is what made my life unfulfilling before I became a parent. And now I am working to unravel that unconscious indoctrination and figure out who I truly am.

All while raising 4 children, working full time, supporting my partner and wanting to make the world a better place.

For the first few posts, I am going to post about our 7 week family trip around the United States this summer. I wrote my observations during the trip for my conscious parenting group. Their comments on those observations helped jumpstart me to actually start the blog.

I hope you enjoy following my awakening to consciousness and that I bring a little good to the world in putting my thoughts out into it.