Life Lessons (A Review)

This post has been updated.

Sometimes I can be a slow learner; I would have hoped that one aha! moment were enough, but today I clearly needed reminding that I can't control everything and everyone around me.

In my mind, it was the perfect plan: I would walk the dog for half an hour, and then take a shower.  If my husband could just get the kids dressed at some point during that hour, we'd all be ready to leave for the Şişli organic farmer's market at 9:30.  We'd all eaten breakfast and I'd even laid out the kids' clothes (--though, mind you, not for the sake of fashion, but rather because it was darn cold today and I wanted to make sure they were dressed warmly enough).

Traffic in Şişli can be a nightmare, and if one doesn't leave the market by noon, one will spend twice as long in traffic as one otherwise would.  Another incentive to leave the house early, get there, do our shopping, and head home is that it would decrease the likelihood of the kids falling asleep in the car on the way back, thereby increasing the likelihood that they'd have good long naps in their own beds.  (And perhaps I would too!)

Do I sound controlling yet?

As I should have/could have/probably subconsciously did predict, when I got home from my walk my husband and two kids were all in the exact same place I'd left them.  When I got out of the shower, they were still "playing."

But how can I possibly insist on schedules when it would mean putting an end to the beautiful moments of "flow" my three men seem to be very good at creating for themselves?  I reluctantly shape airplanes and butterflies out of play dough because the dirty dishes and the unrefrigerated leftovers and the laundry nag at me.  But today my husband took parenting to new heights, painstakingly making a two-dimensional tree and a rabbit for our son, and showing him (and me!) a whole new world of play dough possibilities.  No toddler art class could have done that!

Not an hour after posting this, I read a New York Times "Motherlode" review of a book on minimalist parenting, whose (male) author felt the book described his parenting style exactly!