Can I clip my toenails?

Posted on by Kendra Lewis

I don’t know what I was thinking. “I will try this blogging thing again, I will write, life will be wonderful.” 

I don’t have time for anything anymore. Between being a full time college student, full time Scentsy Director, part time employee for KKWK, full time wife and mother and all of the other random titles/activities that I pick up on the side….there is just no time. And I was going to start blogging regularly. I barely have time to groom myself. Fingernails, toenails, eyebrows…it’s all going down hill. Freshly painted nails are out, I am lucky to keep them clipped and clean. 

One thing I never loose time for though is my determination. I am determined to do something for me. Not the somethings for me that I do to make money, but something for leisure. 

I WILL WRITE. You’ll see. 

Clipped & Clean,
Kendra

Let’s try this again…

Posted on by Kendra Lewis

I find my self saying that a lot lately, “Try Again.” Matthew is in the first grade now and he is working so hard on reading and spelling. In the evenings we study together and he’ll get words wrong and I will correct him. Then he will try again and again until he gets it right.

I spend a lot of time working with Matthew on making him better, and little time making myself better. In many ways I think I need to be telling myself to “Try Again.”

I want to “Try Again” every time I loose my cool, forget something important (happening a lot lately), raise my voice, say something that I shouldn’t have, there are so many ways I think I can do better. How can I expect my son to take me seriously when I correct him, in an effort to help him be better, if I am not correcting myself. If I want him to work hard at making himself better, I want him to see me working hard to make myself better.

One thing that I have learned about myself over the years, is that I am better when I write. I may not have the best grammar (hopefully this semester of copy editing will help with that), but writing improves me. One day when I die, my family will go through all of my junk and find notebook after notebook filled with scribbles, random numbers and pages of my thoughts. I have little organization of my thoughts, just pages filled with them.

I recently went through some of the notebooks and found that I mainly write when I am mad or frustrated. Instead of venting at others, or posting my drama all over Facebook, I conceal it in notebooks in my house. It may sound terrible that I write mostly in times of trouble, but I found something amazing about myself while going through those old notebooks. I found that I start out venting to myself on paper and my rants of scribbles usually end on a very happy and thankful note. See when I write, I am able to work through my frustrations, and in the end, I feel so much better. As I was looking back through some of my notes, I was able to vividly remember the feelings that I had when I wrote them, and seeing how I worked through them on paper, was, well I already said it…amazing.

Writing is good for me, but I want more than my random notebook scribbles. I started my first blog in 2010. I made two posts and then attempted again in 2011. Then I attempted again in 2012, this time I decided I needed two blogs (because I was just writing so much lol). In 2013 I gave up on both blog sites, deleted them and created a brand new one, this one. I blogged four times in 2013. Well it is nearing the end of 2014 now, and I bet you see a pattern here. LOL

Here we go….Let’s try this again.

Yelling Fools

Posted on by Kendra Lewis

My reply:

I read a blog post today, ‘The Important Thing About Yelling.’  In the post a mother confesses to yelling at her children as a result of her busy life and those everyday life distractions.  She tells about her experiences in yelling at her children and specifically explains a look she got from her daughter when she accidentally spilled a box of rice.  The women explained that it was that look that broke her down, she had realized that her children were afraid of her.  She said that she was not the mother that she wanted her kids to grow up with.

I think many parents feel like this at one point or another.  I know that I have yelled at my son and sat there and thought to myself, “what did I just do?”  Sometimes life get’s you down, it’s easy to loose control.

I don’t think there is a problem with raising your voice to your child when the time calls, but I don’t want to yell….ever. What does yelling do, how does it help? ….the answer is, it doesn’t.

1) Yelling is a sign of weakness…it shows you lack control.
2) Yelling creates a environment that no one wants to be in. If you constantly yell at your kids they are eventually going to pull away from you in fear that they will get yelled at for yet another thing they “did wrong.”
3) Yelling at another person just get’s you upset, it does not relieve any stress…it just causes more.
4) When your yelling, no one is listening to you, so you are not accomplishing anything, only conveying fear and in some cases embarrassing yourself.

I think it is important to remember that we are all human and we all make mistakes. It is easy to get off track in your life. In one instant everything you said that you weren’t going to do, all of those ugly behaviors you didn’t want to have, can come out. I think it helps to find someone in your life that can help you to stay on track. Like a spouse, if you can correct each other’s behavior in a loving, non-judgmental way with the mutual goal of helping each other to continually work a little harder to be a little better…I think that finding that person to help is key. In some ways my son even helps correct me in my attempts to correct him. I sometimes talk to Matthew about how I want to be talked to and I then ask how he wants to be talked to. In one of those conversations he told me that he did not want to be yelled at, and I said, “neither do I.” I correct him when he does something “wrong” (I hate that term because if you are learning, there is no wrong), and sometimes he even gives me a reminder of how I want to treat him.

When you think about how you would want other people to treat your kids, do you live up to your own standards?

It’s hard though. Everyday you see people acting in ways that maybe they didn’t intend to, I’m sure most people don’t wake up in the morning and plan to cuss out a cashier at McDonalds because they screwed up their order (I watched this happen last week). But what do you do? You can’t go around correcting people’s behavior. Unless that correction is coming gently from someone you know and trust, it won’t be well received. In fact, even if it is coming from someone you know and trust it still may not be well received. My husband often corrects me, as I do him, and most of the time neither one of us receives those corrections well.

So what do you do? Well I don’t know, but I sure don’t want to be that mom who you see yelling at their kids across the grocery store because at some point they got so used to yelling at them that yelling has now become their general form of communication.

I want a calm household, where we talk…not yell.