Challenge #11--Bad Habits and Flaws

Bad habits and flaws?  You expect me to admit these?

I already admitted I'm socially challenged . . . Um . . . I never get enough exercise . . . I get single-mindedly focused on accomplishing tasks sometimes and forget the bigger picture . . .

I am a horrible housekeeper, and my daughter management skills need work.  Housekeeping seems to be an exercise in futility:  no matter how well I do it, it has to be done again the next day.  (Can you sense a bit of procrastination here?  It could probably be listed in its own paragraph.)  If I was a really good manager, I wouldn't have to worry about the housekeeping, because, as the Country Bunny in the old story, I'd have my kids doing a good deal of it.  And sometimes I try.  But I get so tired of cajoling, persuading, threatening, or whatever else I have to do to get them to do stuff, after they've come home from school and I've come home from work, that it just doesn't seem worth the effort.  (And, after all, I want them to like being home--to feel it is a haven.  Therein lies the quandary.)

To be honest, it's simple enough for me to pick apart myself, and I can find more bad habits and flaws than I would care to write about.  But it's hardly a productive exercise.  I find it more difficult, but more constructive, to notice where I've managed to improve on things, because I can feel buoyed up and encouraged to improve something else, instead of thinking I may as well crawl into a hole and die now.  (Not literally "die", but you know what I mean.)

Soooo, looking on the bright side, this weekend, in spite of the fact one of my high school daughters was being very difficult about getting her school poster project done ("But, Mom, I just don't know what to do . . ."), I put on my happy face, made her laugh, helped her work through the process of planning out her project, showed her how to use rulers in Word (so she could print out her material to the needed sizes), and cheerfully got her back on track every time she derailed.  It was a lot of work, and it took a lot of internal, focused discipline, because my first thoughts were along the line of a bunch of nagging.  But by the time it was done, she had a poster of which she was proud, and she had told me, "Mom, I think this is the first project I've done where I really felt I had been creative."

A small step to becoming the person I should be . . . a small step.