I remember vividly trying to beat my parents to the mailbox during progress report time. I’m sure parents get grades emailed these days, but when I was in high school all our grades got snail-mailed to our house. It became a running “joke” (funny/not funny) that progress reports aren’t “real.” My siblings and I made our best efforts to convince our parents that by the time the progress reports made it to our house, our grades were already improved, and to pay no attention to the grades on the progress report. I’m still not sure whether they believed us, but I think we wore them down with our tactics to a point of indifference.
It can be exhausting to convince ourselves that we need to make progress, constantly grading ourselves on our current goals – weight loss (ha!), cleaning and organizing, career orientation, the running list of goals in our minds seems to be ever-growing. I don’t know about you, but I can be a little hard on myself at times. This is true in my role as mom, too. I’ve mentioned before that constant thought in my mind of ‘am I doing enough?’ I never want to put Regan in a position where I find myself thinking ‘I wish I would have done X better or sooner.’ But I’ve learned something along the way – no matter my efforts, I can’t control everything, and there are times that call for relaxation and just enjoying the progress we’ve already made.
I made a conscious decision to take a break from therapy with Regan for a couple weeks, and unconsciously took a little break from blogging, too. In the time of our break, I think we’ve both been a little more relaxed and I’ve had the opportunity to let her grow and play with a little less structure in our lives. I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that she’s made some BIG leaps in the past month. We’ve converted to 100% table food, she’s able to self-feed quite a bit, she’s pulling to stand on EVERYTHING, she’s four point crawling and bear crawling, she understands several words and can sign two (all done and more), she is shifting weight in standing position (and hopefully will start furniture “cruising” soon!). She as TWO teeth! My pride for her grows every day.
Thank y’all for continuing on this journey with us and for allowing our little break to appreciate our progress. Back to our regularly scheduled programming!
