And that’s not even close to the end of where the expectations that we hold for ourselves massively diverge from those that we hold for our kids.  Here is one... trying lots of foods.  Believe me, when I go to a restaurant if there is a gross sauce on my plate or, god forbid, a mushroom, I am so not thrilled about it.  I may appear happy and cheerful when I return the plate to sender but I am not ever eating a mushroom.  Sorry - they taste like dirt to me.  My kids, though, they need to try things.  Lots of things!  Even things that I personally detest the very idea of and wouldn't try.  And in spite of that ol’ “you don’t know if you don’t try it” thing, there are things that I promise I know without trying.  And I bet they do too - but I don't really trust them to know that yet.

Here’s another thing.  Being a grumpy, hangry pain in the ass in the morning.  For adults it’s just fine because we need our coffee and stuff to be right in the brain.  But a grumpy kid at most any time of day or night is completely unacceptable.  “We do not behave that way”.  “You can sit in your room until you can cheer up”.  “You will not start the day like this”.    Just  a few choice phrases that reflect our impatience for things that we forgive in ourselves possibly more than a dozen times a day.

I can’t stand it when my kids make a mess of stuff.  Like they spill something or they get flour all over the kitchen when making cookies.  It irritates me to death that they keep their clothes piled up and not neatly stacked away.  For those who do their own laundry, the fact that they run out of clean shirts makes my skin crawl with annoyance.  One of my own offspring incessantly singing a song over and over is enough to make me get the moustache duct tape from the drawer and apply it liberally to their mouths.  But the thing is that I do every single one of those things.  Every.  One.

You know and I know that my annoyance at someone forgetting to lock a dog cage or not closing a Cereal bag completely has no bearing on mine or my kids ability to make those things happen in the future.  We are fallible and imperfect beings who may at times be unfocused on the minutia of a cereal bag.  The patience to accept in another person that which you can’t accept in yourself, well, that may just be the pinnacle of enlightenment – the pinnacle that we can for sure envision but not really ever reach. 

Sorry, y'all.  Siblings are Gonna bicker.  Drinks are gonna spill.  Clothes are gonna pile up to the sky until you really need them and then they are gonna all be dirty.  The morning will be a grumpy time.  These things are promises, not threats or worries, not even things that you can carefully architect away, they are indelible truths.  For us and for our kids.  So how can we be as tolerant of these human flaws in our children as we are in ourselves? 

I’m still too annoyed by my daughter’s breakfast cereal spill to think about it right now but I suspect that sometime today I will figure it out - hopefully before anyone gets frustrated with homework because I can't stand that.