In a time in motherhood when all you hear is “you should do this” or “have you tried that”, be a mom that opts out of what everyone else is doing.
I’ve always been that person who was a little bit different than everyone else, in the sense that I never liked to follow the crowd. If everyone went left, I went right. I just have my own way of looking at things and perceiving them. And it’s no coincidence that the same logic I’ve used in my life as a single, childless adult, is the same one I use now as a married mom of four.
There are so many things I see parents doing nowadays that I don’t necessarily agree with. If I was to list all those things, we’d be here forever. So today I’m going to share with you my top 10 things I don’t do as a mom of four in this current season of life.
10 Things I don’t do as a Mom
1. Sleepovers
Sleepovers are just one of those things that I can’t and won’t do. Of course, we have let the kids stay with my parents or my husband’s parents, but friends? No way! That’s not to say that we don’t have absolutely any trust for even our closest friends, but anything can happen. For the safety of my kids and anyone else’s kid, we refuse to have sleepovers whether it be at our house or somewhere else. I personally never had a sleepover either. My mom never allowed it and guess what. I turned out perfectly fine.
2. Buy name brand clothes
Let’s be honest, kids ruin clothes and shoes. I mean, they’re kids! They’re always playing around, thrown on the floor somewhere and the chances of them ruining a piece of clothing are very high. Besides that, they outgrow their clothes extremely fast. With four kids, buying name brand is not very ideal. We have, occasionally bought them name brand sneakers that they are only to use on certain occasions to make sure they last longer. But for their everyday shoes, Walmart is our best friend.
3. Clean up after the kids
My older kids are ages 8, 6 and 4 (the youngest is a month old), so hear me when I say that they are old enough to clean up after themselves. I’m not talking these huge tasks that are difficult for them, but more so things like cleaning up their own room, putting their dirty dishes in the sink, and wiping down surfaces that they dirtied. I’m determined to teach my kids to be independent from an early age because I want them to be adults who will not always need to be dependent of others. Of course, there are still things I do for them, but for the most part, they do have to pick up after themselves.
4. Let them have electronics
I am not that parent that gets their kids their own tablets, tv’s or phones. We have three tvs in our home right now: in the living room, the master bedroom, and the play area has a small one that the kids share. As for ipads/tablets, we have one, which we use for homeschooling purposes when needed. Besides that, we don’t let them have their own electronics. They really don’t need them at this age and with all the cyber issues going on nowadays, it’s just better to hold off on giving them any electronics until they are mature enough to handle the responsibility that comes with owning their own device.
5. Pretend to have it all together
Eight years and four kids later, I have learned to stop pretending like I have it all together. Listen, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with needing and asking for help. If I could go back to the beginning years of motherhood, trust and believe I would ask for more help. I have found that accepting help from people who genuinely love and care for us has made this journey of motherhood so much more enjoyable and less overwhelming because it happens. Motherhood isn’t always roses. There are hard times that come along and when they do, we have to realize that we were never meant to do motherhood alone.
6. Buy toys frequently
When my older three were younger, we used to always leave the store with something for me. As they’ve gotten older, we’ve tried to teach them that not every time we go somewhere, they need to have a new toy or a candy. I always remind that when Christmas time comes around, they’ll get lots of new toys. If we were to buy a new toy, regardless of the size, every time we went to the store, imagine how much money we would waste a year. Not only that, but most kids will play with a toy a few times and then they forget about it. So we leave the toy buying for the holiday season. Now, every once and a while we do reward our kids with a little something, but we definitely don’t buy them toys all the time.
7. Watch Disney
There was a time when I absolutely loved Disney. Our Disney+ subscription was sacred to me until I started noticing more of their woke culture content. I’m sure this isn’t news to anyone so I’ll spare you further details. But I knew we had to cancel the subscription to protect our littles from exposure to certain things we don’t want them exposed to just yet.
8. Fold their clothes
I can already hear the gasps, lol. Nope! I don’t fold their clothes. When doing laundry, I split up their clothes in their designated piles and they’re each responsibility for tossing the individual items into their prospective baskets/drawers. I used to cringe every time I opened one of their drawers and saw everything, I had folded just thrown in there. So I finally came to terms with the fact, that they are little kids, and if they’re searching a piece of clothing, there’s no way those drawers are going to stay organized. So I just went with it. It honestly makes my life easier, anyway.
9. Send our kids to public schools
This can be a given, but we chose not to send our kids to public school and homeschool them instead. With all of this gun violence and woke culture we have going on, we prefer to have our babies’ home with us. We’ve now been homeschooling for 5 years, and it’s been the biggest blessing and such a fun journey. At the moment, we don’t foresee us sending the kids to public school pretty much ever. We’re going to ride this out as far as we can with the help of the Lord.
10. Wake up before the kids wake up
My alarm used to be set for 5am every morning a few years ago. I considered myself to be a “productive mama” by doing that but all it did was exhaust the heck out of me by the time 12pm came around. That was when my kids were a lot younger than they are now. At a certain point I finally realized that I was not helping myself by waking up at the butt crack of dawn, so I changed it. My goal now is to be up by 7am. As homeschoolers, we tend to sleep in later than the average family, so the kids typically wake up by 8am. Seven o’clock gives me enough time to shower and have some quiet time before the older ones wake up.
What 10 things don’t you do as a mom?
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