Book Review - Loving the Little Years

Remember that scene in "On Golden Pond" where Norman grumpily thumps a book at the kid and mutters, "This is Treasure Island.  It's a good book.  Read it!"

That's how I do book reviews, I'm afraid.

It probably won't surprise you that I've read a lot of nonfiction books on how to be a better mother/wife/housekeeper.  I used to plow through stacks from the library, back when I could go to the library with any kind of ease, and cherry-pick a good idea from a mountain of bad ones.  Mom/Wife/Houswife books are like Pez.  You can pop them off like three or four in a day, and mostly they're all the same.

I've done your "What to Expect" thing (bad idea, that).  I've done your Dr. Sears thing (better, if you can look past the brightly naive tone).  I've read The Stay-At-Home Mom's Survival Guide (some good ideas, but sort of grim in outlook), and Confessions of an Organized Homemaker (which is worth reading more than once, and really does work) and Home Comforts (which ought to be treated like a textbook or dictionary, but is useful for figuring out how to clean special or strange things).  Most of these books--not Confessions--are different from each other but the same in one way: they make you feel more or less inadequate.

They often do this while they are trying to help you and while they are assuring you that you are not meant to feel inadequate from their advice.  Then they turn around and say something like, "all moms need to have at least two hours of alone time per week.  Negotiate with your spouse or find a babysitter and leave the house for two hours, to get a haircut, go to a doctor's appointment, or just browse bookstores.  If you don't get this, you will not be in any mental state to care for children."

This is an example of advice that sounds eminently reasonable, makes a mom of littles pant with desire (ALONE time?!?!? sign me up!), and that is, for me, utterly unattainable.

No, it isn't that the Husband refuses to watch the kids.  It's that one of them breastfeeds, one of them is in a clingy phase where he gets sad and sobs if I go to the bathroom without him, and the third wants to come with me because she's worried I'll select the wrong haircut if she's not there to give advice.  Going away for two hours isn't worth the four hours of recovery I have to oversee when I get home.  Which leaves me where?  You guessed it.  "Not in any mental state to care for children."

(Well, we all knew that.)

Not so Loving the Little Years -- this is written by a woman who, in her own words, "didn't have children so long ago that I only remember the special parts".  It's a series of meditations or devotionals that are designed to challenge and encourage the mom who is at home, all day, with little, grubby, grabby, wonderful, passionate, fussy, destructive, creative, and energetic people.  The author has five kids and they were ages five and under when the book was written.  It's evident by the way she intersperses her devotional with things like "because you're pretty sure you hear someone playing with the microwave." (Amen, sister, preach it!)

I've read four or five of her bite-sized chapters so far.  They are all encouraging and contain a nugget that I can use during my day.  For instance, talking about passionate emotions (and girls), Jankovic compares emotions to horses.  Having the emotions isn't wrong, and we don't want to cripple our children's horses, but we want to teach them how to ride--what to do with those emotions so they don't become destructive.

Since I've got a passionate one (Miss Boo), the perspective was great.  We've been working on the concept "You are the boss of your feelings--just because you are mad doesn't mean you have to have a fit."  So I liked Jankovic's idea to say before a situation that might be explosive, "We're going to go do  ____ and you might feel like you want to fuss.  What are we going to do instead?"  Give your kids (and yourself) tools for dealing with their emotions.  Simple, but it hadn't always occurred to me.

I link to the Kindle edition above because it's only $6.00, and it's worth getting.  If you want to give a mom with littles a gift that will encourage her, I can't think of anything better than this.  (Well, maybe this bundled with a candle and bath salts, but I haven't been able to light the candle I bought three weeks ago yet and I haven't had a soak in....huh, I don't really remember.  So maybe just this.)

Anyway.  Good book.  Read it.

Cheers,

Breanna