Last weekend I went away for 3 nights with two friends. This is the longest time I have ever been away from my kids, and I was so excited…. though as I drove down the highway, I felt strange. In my head at that time, I thought my girl would be totally fine. She is 9, she had a ballet recital and a sleepover, she was going to be busy, and I thought my 5 year old would suffer the most…. I constantly checked in on him, and he seemed to be coping. I didn’t hear much about my girl, so of course I thought everything was fine.
After 3 nights, a course, lovely dinners and some cocktails with friends, I drive home and pick the kids up from school. My girl runs to me and gives me the biggest hug…and it all comes out. She has had a hard time. The sleep over wasn’t all fun, her friend had done some mean things and it had followed into Monday morning at school.
The mumma bear comes out in me, and I start to recite everything I have learnt from some inspiring speakers over the weekend at my course, Gather to Grow. “Not everyone is your people, its ok to hold your space, you don’t have to follow her because she is bossier, you decide what you want, do you really want to be in the popular group?”….. all of these questions are asked and we chatted a lot and a lot more truths started to come flowing out.
Why did I think a 5 year old was going to be worse off than my 9 year old who had to handle a sleepover with the popular girl? She struggles with social situations at the best of times and isn’t confident enough to assert herself, so why would I leave her to just handle that and not check in? Of course the guilt kicked in.
I have started to listen to a lot of tween podcasts, following a prompt from a friend in Australia. Instead of whacking on music at the gym, I have started to be a podcast runner (who would of thought…if you aren’t, give it a go) and at the moment, one of my favourite podcasts is by an Australia duo Sophie Pearce & Jayde Couldwell, and is called beyond the bump.
It is a really good starting point to handling these tween situations, and putting the building blocks in place for the future. The biggest one is the lines of communication. Keeping them open and non judgemental and safe, to make sure you can still keep the conversations flowing about what is going on in their life.
I am no parenting expert, but I am trying to change the parenting style that I was bought up with, which was basically don’t talk. And when you do talk, you get in trouble for what has gone on. So in the end, you don’t talk. I don’t want my children to feel alone in a lot of these situations and try and fix it themselves, without really knowing how, or why these things happen.
I am going to sit tight for school pickup today, edit some photos and just pray that my girl can start to put the strategies I taught her in place.
For now, here are a few photos below of the short time I got to look around Bristol below.
Some quick recommendations for food are:
Ramen Monster in the middle of Bristol https://www.ramenmonster.co.uk/
Pho in the Centre of Bristol https://www.phocafe.co.uk/locations/bristol/
The Granary, Bristol. https://www.granarybristol.com/
And we stayed at an air bnb in the centre of Bristol which was just fantastic. Great for a girls weekend, and also brilliant for families with 3 bedrooms, lots of space, bright and open and has lots of kids toys.
I hope you all have a great week!
PS: I have two bookings vacant over the next 3 weeks, so if you have just had a bubba and are sitting on the fence about getting a shoot done, send me a message and we can chat all about it.
