Off the Charts – Mommy Blogger

01/15/2020

I’m a teacher, wife and mom of a very proud soon-to-be big sister. My blogs highlight the happy and humorous moments of parenting. I love music, writing, the outdoors and mommy-ing and I enjoy sharing how kids have a magical way of making favourite past-times like these even better.

A conversation before Christmas with a fellow mom and friend got me thinking about this topic, and, ironically, I’ve been analyzing it all in my mind ever since.

In a world where, throughout our careers, we are bombarded with stats and crazy amounts of analytics, where every move we make is measured and carefully placed on stats sheets, where our billable hours are documented down to the half hour, passing through the portal from work-world to mom world can be a difficult one.

Where are the progress reports?  What did we accomplish all day?  There isn’t an app for that. The only app that might give a sliver of evidence as to how much we really do all day is the Apple Watch app that would typically show we tripled our steps goal, move goal, stand goal and are probably in the negatives in the calorie department.  But even that says nothing about the specifics of what we actually did.  It just proves it was a lot of…something, or more accurately, somethings.

The funny thing is that even if these things could be graphed in real time, they would look something like this: Kid A threw her spoon of food two less times than yesterday- a 0.03% decrease.  Or one could put a different spin on it and note that the distance of said child’s spoon flings averaged 4% further than yesterday.  Good for the up and coming baseball star.

And amidst these less-than-impressive stats, our kitchens can still be less than sparkly, our laundry can sit half done, and we can be four days into an unintentional hair detox.  None of what you can immediately see would look good on a spreadsheet.  So what on earth results from all our expended energy?

The most amazing things.  That’s what.  And the results are right under your nose…or likely on your hip…or sleeping in your bed…or wrapped around your neck.

Look at the little creature who knew zero words six months ago and can now speak in sentences.  Consider the little being who could be laid on your bed mere months ago without the fear of moving at all, who can now follow you to the next room within seconds.  Never mind the hilarious stories from the mouths of cutie pies who, a year ago, couldn’t tell you more than the fact that they wanted more milk, or the gooey fruit chews carefully wrapped in sticky Kleenex handed up to you from chubby little hands as gifts just when you need them the most. You did that Mom, your work and sweat did that. You taught them about Love and you show it to them everyday in the simple life you give to your kids.

Spread sheets and stats and analytics are great, and if what a mom did could be quantified in that way it would yield results off the charts.  But the results don’t fit on the charts in the first place.  So just know, that what you do is amazing and important and worth every bit of the energy you pour into it.