Where have I been? And Perspective!

This week was our MOPS group's annual toy and clothing sale. I've been madly getting things ready to sell and then WHAM! Time to work my little tail off. The trouble was, I didn't take enough time off work, so it's been dashing here and there at five hundred miles an hour.

When I got home last night, I had to have a "talk" with the bigger child about some rules she'd broken during my time dashing about. We talked, I grounded her, and then she ran into her room, crying. Then the baby came to see me.

"Mom, you have to have a talk with me."
"Why?"
She snuggled up to me, batted those sweet little lashes, and said, "Cuz I been bad."
"What'd you do that was bad?"
"I bad. You have to talk to me."
I realized then that it had been almost two days since I'd taken the time to snuggle with my little one and just talk to her. But I also thought it hysterically funny that she'd come to the conclusion that since "being bad" had gotten her sister some one on one time with mom after two days of nothing, that she'd give it a shot.
"What did you do that we need to talk about?"
More snuggling and batting of eyelashes. "I bad."
The resident suggested that perhaps the "bad thing" the baby had done was drive her nuts. I asked the baby if that was what she'd done wrong.
In a very earnest voice, she says, "Yes. I do that. I bad. I grounded, too?"
This is about the point where we all had to fight to keep from breaking out in hysterical laughter.
"You're grounded too."
Just like her sister, she jumped up and ran to her bedroom, crying.

After we stopped rolling on the floor, I had a sobering thought relating to the lack of time I'd spent with her. Two days. That's all it took for her to figure out that being bad would get her "mommy time". And it's true that the less time I spend with them, the worse they behave.

I know I'm not a perfect mom, but I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at the job. As much as I think that these guys are my priority, it amazes me how something so simple makes me refocus. An innocent girl, willing to claim she did something bad just so she could get some one on one time with mommy.

There are so many things on our to-do lists. But the one thing we need to make sure doesn't get shuffled out of the picture is that special time to let our families know they matter. It's easy to say we're doing it for them-working extra hours so they can have nice things, or volunteering to help out on a project that raises money to help them. But ultimately, none of those things matter if our kids don't have us.