mindful parenting in three days

My three days of zen parenting are over. It wasn't so zen. Dutch and I had several arguments, and I've ignored her a lot. We've also done some nice reading together, and had some nice conversations, and she's demonstrated some emotional maturity and perceptiveness that I thought was kind of impressive. It rained a lot, and we spent most of the time in the apartment together. We cleaned a whole herd of dustbunnies out of the big bedroom, and washed the walls and baseboards in there, too. Baby X is going to be sleeping with us, and I feel a certain responsibility to at least do the kind of basic cleaning that I suspect most people do weekly.* Dutch liked that a lot; she pretended to be Snow White laboring cheerfully away, dressed in rags, and I was the Evil Queen (yay!). I gave her a small piece of hardbread to carry around in a bag to nibble on and pretend it was her only food of the day.

We've also done a bunch of thrift shopping, which we both enjoy, but which also brings us to confrontations about how she wishes to spend her allowance money. She spent $6 this weekend, on a Barbie doll,** an ugly little purse, and two books of Disney movie stories. These are very unappealing things, in my opinion, but way better than some of the other things she wished to buy - shabby and grubby stuffed animals, a white polyester dress, a vinyl stuffed car, a Flintstones movie. I  spent some time dissuading her from buying awful things - my position is that she is allowed to buy what she wants, but I can express my disapproval, and I can also limit her purchases to, say two items. I'm also soon going to have to start enforcing some kind of "buy one item, dispose of another" rule, in order to keep our apartment from overflowing. We've been rearranging furniture, in an attempt to achieve a configuration that allows us to move freely from room to room. We're not there yet.

Anyway, all I wanted to say was that we're not zen yet, either. I think I achieved approximately 48 seconds of mindfulness this week with Dutch. I'll shoot for a minute and a half over the three months of summer.

*Luckily, we've got a few more weeks left to build up a healthy layer of dust to give the new immune system a work out. 

**She now owns two, and the only way I can reconcile myself to this turned out to be by leading her into a plotline in which Barbie One and Barbie Two are married to eachother (they live in Canada). Their names are Hanna Barbie Orange and White Flower Petal.