Tag: parenting

Hold On, But Don’t Hold Still by Kristina Kuzmic

~ Chaos With My Coffee ~ Leave a comment

 

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Our book club was lucky enough to receive advanced reader copies of Kristina’s book Hold on, But Don’t Hold Still to read and discuss before it launched. The really cool part is that she  surprised our book club meeting (she faked bad cell reception and busted through the doors) and signed actual copies we kept and it was such an amazing night!!

I had known of her from her funny and uplifting viral videos and this book looked as if it would be the same.

It totally was not, now don’t take that the wrong way either. It was just not what I was expecting. I expected a nice light, easy and fun read. Nothing serious or heavy, but somehow she managed to tell real life stories that hit home on so many levels.

She gives advice without being preachy or self-helpy as she retells her past.
Going through more than you would imagine she would as an outsider looking in. This is typical for us all, on the outside we all look well put together, and like we have never had a hardship in our life.. but that is so far from the truth.

I really took away some good insights from her book about navigating parenting, which is something we ALL struggle with and are not always so vocal about (and sometimes we cant be as vocal as we want out of respect for our kids privacy).

She hits on struggles with being a single parent, blending a family, struggling with the aftermath of living through an actual war, guilt, parenting challenges, depression, negative self talk and so much more.

My Favorite Quotes Were:

  • “We are hard on ourselves because we hate falling short of our own expectations. We hate that we struggle with this parenting thing that we hadn’t predicted before we had kids. That’s why we feel the guilt. Because it feels like we are failing. Our expectations were unrealistic in the first place! We aren’t failing, we are learning!”
  • “This should be your mantra ‘this too shall ass, its not personal, I’m a badass, at least one brand of ice cream is on sale right now, I don’t need my kids to be my biggest fans at all times.’”
  • “Challenging kids doesn’t equal bad parenting. Even incredible parents end up with kids who are asses.”
  • “But I am doing the best that I can, and the stuff I don’t know, I’m choosing to learn.” “I’m giving myself more grace than judgement.” “Please choose to give yourself more credit than criticism and more grace than judgement.”
  • “I can break without being broken forever.”
  • “Keep showing up. Because as one chapter ends you can look back and see it as a meaningful and enlightened step that has contributed to my life journey.”

 

You don’t know how the current chapter will end, its a work in progress. So keep showing up!

I really loved this book, and would totally recommend it to any mom, married, or divorced or single woman!

Check it out where you buy your books and share it with your girlfriends!

-Hannah (1)

Pistachio Children

~ Chaos With My Coffee ~ Leave a comment

Parenting is complicated, the roads it takes us on are never straight, the journey is relentless, and sometimes (lets be honest, most times) we don’t see an end in sight that is comforting.

After momming for nearly a decade, I can safely say with complete certainty that parenting will be the hardest battle I ever fight. There will be days when there is great joy, huge sorrow, tears, laughter, doors slamming, hurt feelings, timeouts, and lots of other emotions as this life we live changes with our phases of life.

I wanted to talk about an analogy that I heard that blew my mind a little bit. It hit home for several reasons, one of them being that we are a farming family, and the other just the simple fact that I am a mom who works tirelessly for her children; like all moms!

So here is the big mind-blowing analogy- the pistachio tree. Thats right, a pistachio tree. When you are a farmer, you are aware of all sorts of scenarios that affect your bottom line and being “profitable” like any other business. I can relate to this because, this our life. So as I sat and listened to this analogy it made total sense to me because we are literal farmers.

Lets imagine you go from being an almond farmer (and we are almond growers) to growing  pistachios.

When you grow pistachios, you hopefully are aware that this is not a typical crop that yields harvestable nuts like new almonds do  in a matter or 2-3 years. Pistachio trees are harvestable in about 7-10 years, thats quite a bit longer!

If you were once a farmer, who saw almost immediate fruits of your labor and now switch gears to now having to wait 7 years longer than expected, if you’re not prepared, or have unrealistic expectations this could be catastrophic!

You will have to PLAN to be patient, persistent, and diligent about your crop year after year, after year, after year, and still you may start to feel impatient, or discouraged. It will take constant work to maintain the new crop you planted to not see any nuts for almost a decade! That is some hard work and determination!

If you are farming with expectations of almond trees while farming your pistachios you may give up completely, or go bankrupt if you didn’t prepare well in advance.

Don’t compare your pistachios to your former almond crop, because you will be disappointed. Even though they are both trees, they have completely different maturity rates.

Parenting is like the pistachio farmer. You work diligently, tirelessly, day in and day out, and while you may EXPECT to see fruits of your labor, you may have a pistachio child not yielding any visible fruit. Heck you may have several pistachio children!

We need to realize that this may be a season that we are in that DOESN’T yield any fruit. It may take YEARS of our quiet maintenance to our children, which are like the pistachio farmer’s crop, before we ever feel like we see the true fruits of our labor.

Even though we may not SEE anything remarkable happening, changes are happening behind the scenes. Just like a tree growing, roots are taking hold underground in the dark quiet places that we will never see. Roots that will make the tree strong, and one day fruitful.

Yet we still persevere. We show up. We tend to our crop, we stand back and admire its beauty, its imperfectness. One day God willing, we will admire a beautiful tree, a tree full of good fruit, and we can breathe easy knowing that our labor and prayers didn’t go unnoticed or unanswered. 

In different seasons of our live, we will feel like the new pistachio farmer who worked and worked to grow a healthy crop. We may feel discouraged, upset, tired and want to give up. If we didn’t have faith that we would one day see the fruits of our labor in tangible and intangible ways we would surely crumble.

I’m so thankful for that analogy, it opened my eyes to the season of life that we are in. I need to not think of my children as an almond trees, when they may actually be a pistachio tree quietly growing and taking root as we pour into them. 

 

John 20:29 ESV  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

 

-XoXo

Hannah