We all have our own style of parenting our children and probably foremost in our method of parenting is the way we keep the lines of communication open with our children. I recently asked readers, “how you communicate with kids?” and the response has been varied and valuable. I didn’t want to keep them to myself, so I thought I would share some of them here with you.

If you’d like to enter the giveaway, there is still time. The giveaway ends on September 4 and you can win a $200 Visa Gift Card just by telling me one of the things you do to communicate with your kids. (Click on the link to enter the giveaway.)

One of the most popular responses to the thing we parents do to communicate with kids, is to eat together. I’ve always believed in eating together and we try to do it as often as we can although in this busy and hectic world we live in now, it’s not always possible.

In order for us to be able to eat together, I try to cook simple meals that the girls can help me prepare. When we work together, we can have dinner on the table in an hour. We don’t always have scintillating conversation with dinner. Sometimes it’s just inane small talk, other times it’s snappy bickering but either way sometimes it leads to topics we didn’t plan on discussing. More often though, it’s just our way of catching up with what we’ve been up to.

EAT TOGETHER Read the rest of this entry »

This kid obviously has issues and so does the brother or whoever he is, who secretly video taped this tantrum then posted it on YouTube. It is funny in an unfunny kind of way, if you know what I mean. Before I say anything else about this behavior, why don’t you tell me what you think first?

It’s almost end of the school year again. Can you believe it? My daughter Asi told me yesterday that she and her boyfriend decided to attend the junior/senior prom at their school and we have just this weekend to shop for a dress! Yeah, thanks for the short notice, my daughter Luckily, she doesn’t seem to be as concerned with the trappings of prom as I remember being when I was her age. She doesn’t want a fancy gown, she says she and her friends are going with a goth theme (eye roll *-*). I can’t wait to see what kind of gown she decides on.

If I have another camera by then, I’ll take photos to share here. Oh, yes, my three year old Kodak point and shoot finally died on me after the fishing trip last weekend. So…. buy a prom dress…. OR buy a new camera? Hmmm…. daughter…. or blogging? LOL! I’m just kidding. All I can do is laugh because my laptop also caught a virus the same day the camera broke and now I have to reformat it. Before I do that, I need to try and salvage as much data as I can. Just the thought of doing the reformat makes me want to cry and stomp my feet and have a total hissy fit but, I’ll try and laugh it off instead.

Here are some of the last photos taken from my dead camera of our fishing trip last weekend. Enjoy!

There are tons of videos on YouTube and other sources on the web made by teenagers. Some are funny, a lot of them are stupid, others downright dangerous, a few not fit for the public and more that are so creative they verge on genius. There are few however, that can be called ‘touching’. Most teens just aren’t into showing their emotions much, well not in the sappy ‘touchy feely’ kind of way anyway. It’s not that they don’t feel them or appreciate having those feelings, sometimes they are just too embarrassed to show them. Yeah, in the twisted mentality of teens, it’s cooler to look stupid than to look like you care about something.

Teens do so many things that are so sweet and thoughtful, it would make you cry. The stories that my daughter tell me of their friends, the acts that I see them do, it makes me really proud. But if you look in their facebook profiles or their blogs, they don’t brag about the sweet things they do. They talk of inane stuff like music they like, what they’re wearing, who’s going out with whom, who broke up, who went to the party, etc. They don’t ever talk about how someone stayed with a sick senior citizen at the mall until help arrived, how they volunteer at the Ronald McDonald House cooking for families with sick children, how one boy sells flowers on valentine’s day and donates to the cancer center to honor his mother who died, or how they help each other with homework and the never ending dramas in their lives.

When my girls were younger, they wouldn’t get out of the car without giving us kisses first and telling us they love us. Now they are a little grumpier. They’re moody and sullen in the mornings and sometimes forget to even say ‘bye’ when they get out of the car much less ‘thanks for dropping me off’. We as parents sigh and just accept that it’s just a phase they must go through. And yet, we can’t help but feel a little neglected and unappreciated, but we all know they love us and we are important to them just as much as they are to us. Which makes the times when they do snuggle back up to us (and they do) as they did when they were toddlers even more special. I tell my girls all the time, even though they’re bigger than me now, that they will always be my babies even when they have their own. They just giggle and snuggle even closer. Those are the best times…. because tomorrow, they could be back to their silent, sullen self again.

Today, I heard about the video that a 14 year old boy made to help his father who had just been laid off work to get a job. It’s a very sweet video, a little sappy and almost made me cry. Which is what makes it hard to believe that a teenager made the movie. But I believe it because I have seen how much teens really do pay attention and they really do care about the things going on around them. Most of all, they do appreciate the things we as parents do for them even though they don’t often show it.