The Gingerbread House Flop

             It’s hard for me to watch my kids struggle.  It’s hard not to just step in, but they really don’t learn anything that way.  The weekend before Christmas, I was planning on letting the girls make their annual gingerbread houses.  The oldest two make their own, and my youngest two share one (both get two walls to decorate).  Unfortunately, germs invaded our house right before Christmas and put my youngest two out of commission; so gingerbread house making was postponed to this week.  One afternoon, we made dough, chilled it, and rolled it out to their specifications.   The following day we decorated, and raised the walls. It took all day!  I’m excited to announce that this year instead of going out and purchasing gobs of candy to decorate the houses with (and having lots left over to, ahem, “dispose” of), we actually used their leftover Halloween candy to decorate.  I noticed that my older girls were much more thoughtful about their choices and more creative in decorating than any of the other years past.  (Last year one of them literally dumped candy inside the house into the cement icing to “hold up the walls.”)  I put the little ones’ house together, but just helped the older two as they requested it.  My oldest decided to make an enormous one with a back wall off in order to make it look like a doll house.  She wanted her gingerbread people to play inside.  My next oldest one decided to just leave the roof off, so that her people could play inside as well.  One succeeded and one failed…any guesses as to who did which?  It was the doll house that began to crash continually as the graham crackers were added to form the boundary between the second and first floor.  I watched as my daughter re-cemented the walls in place a couple of times, and even tried toothpicks to fortify the walls.  It was hard to watch her struggle, and at first I tried to give her little pieces of advice.  Clearly, she wanted to do it on her own because she ignored me; so I just ended up being quiet.  Finally, the walls began breaking into pieces from all the falls.  She announced that she was done, and I could see her eyes looking very watery at that moment.  I went over and gave her a big hug, and told her I was proud of her for coming up with an original idea.  I told her that she really did a fantastic job decorating the walls, and it was ok that her idea didn’t work this time. 

                Usually, I would’ve had to step in to help my daughter. A little over a week ago, I was notified that I get to be apart of the launch team for Jill Savage's newest book which means I had the benefit of reading through “No More Perfect Moms” last week…a big part of the book deals with our expectations about our children.   It talks a lot about letting them fail, and about not trying to change them.   The book basically lays out the people we deal with as women, the problems that we face, and the antidote for each of them. (If you're interested in the book, make sure you wait to order it until the week of Feb. 4-9 because Moody publishers will be offering more than $100 worth of bonuses like e-books, audio workshops and more.) The chapter on kids talked about how imperfect they naturally are (just like us) and that our tendency is to want to change them.  I was extremely convicted by the line “However, if we work to change another person, it is likely that we love ourselves more than we love that other person.”  She goes on to talk about how love is what is really called for when we are dealing with our kids, and gives practical ways of implementing that.  I realized that by letting my daughter fail; I was loving her just the way she was and not trying to “fix” her.

                All day long as the girls had finished their houses, I had uploaded pictures with their finished masterpieces to Facebook.  The gingerbread flop was the last one to be finished, and I was tempted not to put it on my page.  I don’t want anyone to look at any of my children as failures.  I want them to always feel the success of life.  However, this really only demonstrated a great idea that hadn’t worked this time not that my daughter is a failure. I simply asked if my daughter minded me putting it up there, and she said that she didn’t.   Mind you, she didn’t get as many likes as the other houses, but no one said anything negative either.

                I’m not a perfect mom, and my girls aren’t perfect either…and I’m ok with that.