Do you or your kids have an advent calendar?
When I was growing up, they just had the ones with little pictures behind the doors, but now it’s amazing what you can get. There are Lego Star Wars advent calendars, and connoisseur chocolate advent calendars, beauty product calendars, and calendars with different flavors of gin…
If you had one, do you remember the excitement of racing downstairs in the morning to open that little door and to see what the new day had brought you?
If you’ve never had one, just think of the excitement you feel before a special day or celebration… wonderful isn’t it?
With every advent calendar door, a new day + a new beginning were marked.
I want to encourage you to give yourself a new door and a new beginning each day as a parent.
The mantra of The Peaceful Parent is ‘progress not perfection.’ My goal is to be a better parent today than I was yesterday.
That’s the only standard I hold myself to.
We’re human, and we’re having human-to-human relationships. With that comes the absolute certainty that we’re going to make mistakes.
We’re going to discover a new loophole that’s taken our child over the line of what we think is OK. We’re going to find a new limiting belief, a new trigger. We’re going to blow up from time to time.
As intentional parents who are approaching this parenting journey thoughtfully, we sometimes get a bit ‘enlightened.’
We think we know how the gig should be and when it’s not like that we get even more frustrated with ourselves. We hold up an even higher standard for ourselves. That makes it really hard to win at this thing called parenting.
So when you’re not the parent that you think you should be, give yourself the chance of a new start.
You can begin straight away.
You don’t even have to wait until the next day to open the little cardboard door and pull out the chocolate in the shape of a Christmas stocking. You get to start again whenever you need to.
And, instead of needing to be the perfect enlightened parent, you can choose to lower the bar.
When we choose to be a better parent today than we were yesterday, I’ve found that it sets is up for more success and more self-forgiveness. Many mamas that I’ve worked with have found the same.
If you want to try it out, let me know how it works for you in the comments below.
XO,
Lisa
PS. I have a free gift for you. I put together a holiday guide for the month of December.
Get Your Peaceful Parent Holiday Guide Now!
The guide is designed to offer tips, ideas and support to help you stay grounded and peaceful during this holiday season.
Wishing you a peaceful holiday season!
