Category: Parenting
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Trei caracteristici
English below – Protejează când trebuie, dar permite când poți. (Dr. Steinberg – sfat pentru părinți de adolescenți) Fii Cald. Părinții cu temperament cald reacționează în așa fel la nevoile emoționale ale copiilor, încât aceștia pot aduna îndeajuns curaj necesar ca ei să funcționeze departe de părinți, din proprie inițiativă. Părinții calzi sunt afectuoși. Ei…
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“Te ceartă tanti (sau nenea)”
I-am spus fetiței mele că are dreptul s-o certe cine o iubește (adică îi vrea binele). Nu m-am gandit mult la asta, ci doar mi-am spus-o mie însămi ca și adult. De fapt, am provocat-o să cântărească intențiile cu care cineva împarte corecții mai mult sau mai puțin întemeiate. Când proverbiala “tanti” mă certa ca…
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Biking
The Easter/ Spring vacation is over. It was rainy and cold, yet so active. I’m taking a break from reading heavy books. Books are my friends and they speak the Truth, they chisel my mind and better my actions, they confront me and they hold my hand. But enough is enough. I decided to go…
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Nothing to say
If I have nothing good to say, I say nothing at all. I’ve had smooth sails. I’ve reached a cruising altitude and I enjoyed it in silence. I must have started 20 drafts of posts. But none saw the light of day. Nothing seemed relevant or felt wise enough to share these days. The last…
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About being special
Humility was bred into me. It was the status-quo. But what I can vividly remember it that it was freeing! Hardy and common. Like the general low expectations. It was often declared with decisiveness from the school pedestal, that we are not special! I was born during communism after all. Yet. Telling our kids that…
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Taking control
There is no exact recipe to parenting. If anyone claims otherwise, is already missing the mark. Even the drive to get it right, to be the perfect parent, can and most likely will mess things up royally. Parenting is messy. Parenting is fluid. Kids change and evolve. And that is good. God planted in us…
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A pillar of prayer
Ask and it shall be given to you. You do not have because you don’t ask. Ask without a selfish heart. I tell Jackie the story of her name. The week we met her we stumbled upon the significance of Jaclyn, rooted in the Hebrew Jacob, meaning “May God protect you”. That was our constant…
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Independence
At age five, jackie stubbornly practices her independence. She has a lot of freedom, though at times I consciously keep pulling back, as I hear myself nagging about this and that. A while ago she started taking our dog for the morning walk through the neighborhood. There she was, at 7 am, skipping on the…
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A mother to a child
I wallowed in self-pity. It gradually became more intense. Once my maternal clock started ticking, with no apparent resolution in sight, I felt hopeless and stuck. Something so seemingly easy, so abundant, why couldn’t it happen to me? Mother’s Day was hard. Hard because I didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I wanted…
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Ambitious & teachable
Never underestimate the ambition of an adoptee. Once they have taken a hold of a steady lifeline, even after they adapt to the good & predictable life, for better or worse they never loose that resilience, that keen awareness, the determination to survive, and to succeed. Yesterday Jackie got evaluated by four professionals to see…
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Parenting with an audience
“Do you ever yell at your kids?” I ask a good friend. “I do. But I yell mostly at home, in private.” She responds with disarming honesty which I love. When I see my parenting from from a far away perspective, it looks clever, funny and balanced. Except I often feel it’s not. For the…
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O viață. Dragoste, Respect și Adevăr.
Am aflat doar la sfârșit că Dana e mama unei femei care m-a mișcat profund prin iubirea și lumina exprimată în durerea văduviei. Dar nu despre asta a fost astăzi. Astazi ne-a fost reamintit neapologetic despre cât de provocatoare și încercată e căsnicia, mai ales în perioada preșcolară a copiilor. Ca să știm lupta efectiv,…