Healthy Me

I am trying to reduce the amount of stress in my life. Over the past couple of years, I've made some great strides by removing toxic relationships from my life. It's helped reduce the stress a lot. When I find myself being sucked back into somebody else's emotional vampirism, I find I can quickly disengage myself easier than I used to. I need all the energy I have to raise my four kids. I don't have a whole lot extra to spend on problems people continuously create for themselves.

Being a parent comes with its own set of stresses.

• There are the activities. When you have four children, if they all pick one extra-curricular activity, it's 1-2 nights (at least) a week for each of them...times four! They definitely keep my busy.
• There are behavioral expectations (manners, respect, etc.). We all know how well kids follow those on their own!
• There are the food struggles (my kids are not big on vegetables) and homework time.
• There are medical appointments and an occasional trip to the Emergency Room.
• Then there is just finding some time for me to decompress.

How do you keep it all together? I know there are days when I don't think I'm doing a very good job of it and those are the days when my husband reminds me that we have good kids (who occasionally give us a hard time over minor things). We have certainly seen a lot worse out in public, children doing things that our children would never think of doing to us like tantrums in children who are way too old to be throwing tantrums in public.

We don't have a written family constitution for our children, though we do have condensed rules posted. I think we're doing OK but none of our kids are teenagers yet. Our oldest is almost there and we are seeing glimmers of what is to come. It's not going to be pretty. I feel like we're on the verge of a whole new set of rules that nobody has told us about yet on how to handle teenagers full-time.