Overcoming challenges in parenting

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Overcoming challenges in parenting

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The two biggest challenges I've overcome in my parent is one, learning to be flexible, because you have all these great ideas about how you'll be a parent, and then your kids come, and they change all of that, and you have to throw it all out the window. For example, we planned on raising our kids overseas. We were going to be ex-pat families who lived cross-culturally and experienced the world. But then my son came along, and he had a severe speech delay, so much that we had to go back to the US, our home country, because he needed lots of speech therapy. So I had to learn to die to myself in many ways, die to my ideas of what would make the best family for us, and really flex. And it's worked out great. We're fine as a family. And we can still hold onto our values no matter where we are in the world. And then the other thing I've had to really learn is to be okay with being myself, and to learn who I am as a person, because that's the best kind of parent I can be, instead of trying to be someone else's parent. An example for me is I learned recently, especially with the dawn of Pinterest, that I'm just not a crafty mom. I would love to be a crafty mom and come up with all these great things for my kids to do every day. But really, I want to do want to do those crafts. I'm great if my kids want to. So that's why we provide art supplies out in our main living area so they can do them all. But I'm not the type of mom to cut and glue paper and glue popsicle sticks and I've learned to be okay with that. And I don't apologize for it anymore, because that's just the mom I am and I have other great qualities I can then focus on, instead of focusing on my weaknesses and trying to be better at those.

Watch Tsh Oxenreider's video on Overcoming challenges in parenting...

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Tsh Oxenreider

Author & Blogger, SimpleMom.net

Tsh Oxenreider is the full-time blogger behind Simple Mom and the founder and creative director of Simple Living Media, a blog network dedicated to helping people live intentionally (while throwing perfection out the window). She thinks a library card, a Netflix subscription, and a passport are some of the greatest parenting tools in the universe. She’s a wife to Kyle, mama to Tate, Reed, and Finn, and is the author of Organized Simplicity and One Bite at a Time: 52 Bites for Making Life Simpler. She is currently working on her next book. Tsh and her nomadic family currently live in Bend, Oregon, but several dots around the globe have also been called home (her 7-year-old has been on 60 airplanes and counting). Together, they love to travel, read books, go camping, and make homemade pizza for Friday Family Movie Night.

Tsh writes about living simply and intentionally at Simple Mom, which was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2012. She was also number 2 in the top 50 Twitter Moms of 2011, was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2011, her blog was nominated for Best New Blog of 2008, and has been mentioned on Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Parents Magazine, and more. She speaks frequently about blogging, writing, living intentionally, and motherhood in between changing diapers and hitting the 'publish' button. She is also an advocate for Compassion International, serving as one of their bloggers, and is a regular contributor at (in)courage. Tsh also records a podcast with Homefries called The Simple Mom Podcast, which during one week ranked second under NPR’s This American Life in most listened-to podcasts.

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