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The Kids Will Forever Come First

Published on April 9, 2013 by Vacation Mom in Sense of Pride

IMG 20130301 122137 768x1024 The Kids Will Forever Come First I am not one to be afraid to walk away from anything if it means that my kids and I will most benefit from a situation. You see, I am a huge promoter of always being at your best. I live my life to find my happiest place and to really know what I need to remain happy.

This is not to say I am not sad sometimes, that I don’t go through various forms of depression when things get extremely challenging. I am human. I am not perfect.

With that being said, I am queen of ensuring that no matter how hard something is to decide or to follow through with after a decision has been made, that I will stick with it and follow through. This may take a long time, sometimes years, but I do it.

IMG 20130315 150932 The Kids Will Forever Come First In turn, my kids see that I always put their happiness {and mine as well as ours as a family} first. This is why my kids and I are so close knit, positive and outgoing. We just have this amazing dynamic and I will never, ever let anything come in between that to break it.

Think about the Mama Bear seeing you happen upon her cub, she will fight tooth and nail to keep that baby safe, even if you meant no harm. That is how I fight – to remind myself that others in our world may not mean harm to us, but as a means to continue to live in this happy rhythm I have worked so hard to create for my family, I will fight at all costs to ensure the balance of kids, family and adult time remains.

There is something about having that balance in your parental and personal life that really helps make things work well together. I love that my life simply flows naturally, and that the kids are happy kids because of how hard I work to remain positive, happy and healthy!

Tags: Disorders, Happiness, Health, Mama Bear, Mental Health, The Bear family, Work, Work and Family

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Why Did I turn on the News?

Published on April 8, 2013 by Vacation Mom in News

Oh my gawd, it’s been a very long time since I have turned the news on and now I know why. While I enjoyed catching up on some local news that I had no clue about as well as seeing what the weather shall be ahead of time, there was nothing but sad, bad and negative coverage. What has our world come to?

We don’t want to test our own missiles because we don’t want to intimidate Korea? We don’t want to flex our muscles anymore, so basically the United States has sadly become a joke. While I am blessed and thankful to live in the “land of the free”, I cannot sit and watch the news because it seems we have lost our willpower to be that super power country. We the people need to stand up and demand that we become that once strongly united country. We can do this.

I fear the world my children will live in as adults is going to be that of a socialist country. One in that the government controls if you can sneeze and takes so much of my kids hard earned income that they barely can survive. We do not need to be dependent upon the government for common sense things. There are many ways to resolve problems in this world.

Here is what I think; I think that we the people need to come together, help each other. It takes a community to raise a child. What happened to neighbors having barbeque’s together, friendly laughter with kids running around outside? We have become lazy, electronically dependent and sadly some children don’t even know what it’s like to go outside and use their imagination to play outside.

The news made me very sad and all wound up at the same time. I realized I was getting all wound up about our country that I had to shut off the news. I couldn’t sit there and listen any longer. I want us to be that country of the people, the strong, the proud but it takes “we the people” to get it that way. I think that regardless of our political views and stance that we can all come together as a nation, a community of humans who care about the future generations to try to resolve issues, help each other and clean out the government in a way that makes them answer to us. After all, the government is suppose to answer to us, so let’s come together and stand strong.

It’s not about what you believe to be right versus wrong. It’s not about your personal views on the various political issues; it’s simply about a wonderful, free nation of people coming together to ensure that each of our views are heard and debated the way they should be in government. Not just favored by who has the most money invested.

I know we can do this, just nervous that it may take a civil war type situation to get things resolved. I don’t want war on our soil. I don’t want war to resolve things. We the People are better than that….use efficient communication alongside standing firm on what we feel is the right government. I don’t feel like we live in the world our fore fathers fought for, it’s sliding slowly into a socialist world and that scares the crap out of me.

Tags: Barack Obama, Government, Korea, New York Times, People, Politics, United States, Warfare and Conflict

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A Family Doesn’t Mean Blood Bond, It’s More than That

Published on April 5, 2013 by Vacation Mom in Relationships

Think about a child you know who has a person they call Mom or Dad who isn’t their blood related Mom or Dad. How about that person you call Grampa but isn’t your blood relative? That’s me. Well the Grampa part. The person I call Grampa on my mom’s side of the family is the person I grew up to call Grampa he was and still is Grampa in every sense of the word, but he was my Gram’s second husband and since I was about 14 years old or so, her ex husband. My Grampa is still a huge part of my life, sadly he gives me crap about not stopping in to visit as often as I should, he only lives down the road really. When my Gram and Grampa went through divorce, something I obviously don’t remember as I was young and that’s adult stuff that kids don’t need to deal with, I ended up still continuing a relationship with my Grampa. From trips to Maine when he lived there to trips to his house he rented here in the town I live in. I loved spending time with my Grampa and even consider all those who are his blood family to be my relatives too, they are truly a part of my family.

When people who are not blood related to you fall apart due to a divorce, creating a situation where they are not longer a legal extension of your blood family yet they still stand by your side and consider you family, love you with all of their hearts and are there for you, that means the world more than anything else. Knowing that I am loved and have an extensive family, full of loving people who are both blood and non-blood related just makes me smile. My Grampa has four children, they have children and my Grampa has siblings too; all of which I refer to as my aunts, uncles, cousins and great aunts and great uncles, what have you. I never say “well used to be cousin”, who does that? Once people have been accepted into your life as your true family, that is simply how it stays. A true bond that cannot be broken unless something extraordinary happens that breaks that bond. In my case, the bond is still going strong.

It is always evident how strong that bond is during my daughter’s various extra curricular activities and I run into my Great Aunt who has a grand daughter about the age of my daughter. The girls always seem to end up in something together through out the year, even though they go to different schools. It’s so much fun to know that not only is my Great Aunt there to witness her own granddaughter, but that she also gets to see how big my daughter is now. It saddens me that I don’t make enough time for some of my family, both blood and non blood related but with Winter being over and the boys getting older, I plan to make a change to start visiting them more often and truly making my complete family more important.

After all, the bonds I have are such that I hope to allow my children to experience too, in their own way.

A Family Doesnt Mean Blood Bond, Its More than That

Tags: Blood, Divorce, Family, Grampa, Grampa Simpson, Home, Maine, Parenting

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Sometimes You Just Have to Walk Away

Published on April 4, 2013 by Vacation Mom in Relationships

Having a healthy debate with someone is part of life, it’s a great way for adults to come to some agreement or compromise about a situation. Allowing your children to see healthy debates teaches them how to handle conflict in their own lives too. It’s a win-win situation when two or more adults can have a healthy debate about a topic without foul language, name calling or yelling. There are debate clubs in schools for a reason, debating is healthy and actually good for everyone, as long as the debate is respectful to all parties involved and doesn’t escalate into a full blown scene from World War II.

If everyone in this world agreed with each other 100%, lived the same 100% way of life and raised their children 100% the same, life would be pretty boring, mundane and uneventful. We would not be engaged to work our brain cells in healthy ways and everyone would walk around in this dreary robotic manner. I for one, love a healthy debate, but with my hot opinions on some topics such as parenting and relationships, it can be difficult for me to have a healthy debate.

I have learned over the past few years how to properly handle a healthy debate and no longer treat other people as if they are wrong and I am 100% right. In all honesty, I am shocked when I am right over wrong because I tend to be wrong more often than not. There is a time when a healthy debate, no matter how healthy it may be, gets to a point where neither party is willing to give a little on their end to help the conversation or situation get resolved amicably. When the point is made that they are not budging on their stance and they are flat out refusing to even understand where you are coming from, then it’s time to simply walk away.

At the point when a conversation or situation gets to a stalemate, so to speak, it’s time for all involved to simply do what they see best given the circumstances and hope that the end result will be a positive one. There are no definites in life, all we can do is 1) know when to walk away and 2) have faith that whatever is meant to be best in the long haul will happen eventually.

Tags: Communication, Debate, Forensics, Health, History, Public speaking, Social Sciences, World War II

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The Topic of Smoking is Offensive Says the Tween

Published on April 3, 2013 by Vacation Mom in Children

I guess the latest discussion during guidance at my tween daughter’s school is smoking. You know that part where the school teaches you how awful smoking is for you and in many instances darn right scares the kids in a way to attempt to keep them from smoking. While my oldest is very well aware of how bad smoking is for you, her Mom is a smoker {me}, she just isn’t in a place to need to hear this topic at the moment in the way it’s being taught. I smoke. I have quit. I have gone back. I have quit. It’s a never ending mind game. I allow my daughter to lecture me and share with me information on why I should quit, she has zero issues with lecturing me and I let her in hopes that some day I will just wake up and quit for good.

I smoke outside, which means during cold months I don’t smoke as often but I still smoke. I do not believe the guidance classes are really offending my daughter about me, she is all about me quitting, I think it’s that her Papa (grandfather on her Dad’s side) passed away recently. Her Papa was a smoker for many, many years. Papa was on oxygen and actually quit smoking only to find out it was not the smoking that made me have all of the health problems he had. Papa was a carpenter most of his life and due to that occupation, he ended up with COPD among other things which were apparently deemed not related to his smoking in later years, after he had already quit smoking.

My daughter is still coping with no longer having her Papa around, which is even harder since her Dad lives in Nana and Papa’s home so when my daughter visits her Dad she is right there in their home with Nana and Dad but Papa is obviously gone. It’s hard. The last thing my daughter wants to hear is smoking lectures about people going on oxygen and getting as sick as her Papa did then blaming it on cigarettes only. My daughter had a good point, she said, ” I am not trying to say smoking is good for you or that it doesn’t cause the problems that the teacher is sharing in the class, I am just saying that the way they are talking about the health issues is as if smoking is the ONLY way you can get this sick. And it is not the ONLY way. I find that offensive”.

While I have compassion and can understand this may not be the best time in my daughter’s life to partake in this sort of talk, having so recently lost her Papa who had a lot of the sickness that is being relayed to have to do with smoking in her class, I also know that it’s good the schools teach this sort of topic. I am more for the parents teaching kids about smoking, drugs and drinking – having an open dialogue about such topics may better deter the children. I simply let my daughter know that life can be offensive, not everything she hears or sees in life is something that is going to be easy or happy go lucky.

I am not someone who wants to never be offended, it’s called life. So while I am extremely compassionate and let my daughter know I understand why she is being so defensive about the topic that the truth is some kids need to learn this in school because their parents are not home engaging in the much needed conversation surrounding how bad these things are to get into. I am just thankful she could open up to me and let me know that she was bothered, rather than lash out in other ways, like towards the teacher who is trying to teach a lesson that many kids need to learn. My daughter is just beyond her years, I always say she is 10 going on 30 and she proved it last night citing her angst about the topic of smoking being the the ONLY cause for some of the health issues her teacher is citing.