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Success Sunday (PostID 1305)

November 2, 2008 at 4:31 pm

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“Start by doing what’s necessary;
then do what’s possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible. “
––St. Francis of Assisi

I took a little hiatus. Ok, a long hiatus. But I would guess that I’m not alone seeing that this is just a busy time of year, then throw in a election in there too. I’ve had sooooo much to blog on and I’m sure I have already forgotten most of it if not all. I had been logging everything in my DayNotez (love it) but The Hub stripped Vista off my laptop and replaced it with XP (sweet) and my phone kept crashing and I had to hard reset it twice and reload everything on it and try to find a replacement for the applications that were crashing it. So Daynotez is neither on my desktop pc nor my phone. Oh yeah, and I’ve had to take care of The Kiddos. lol. We had Fall Break last week and we let The AP off for most of the week because The Lolo and The Lola were in town visiting. You know how that goes. You think you will be productive because you have built in babysitters but I’m way too social to sit at the computer when I can have adult conversations in the convenience and comfort of my own home.
This week were the Halloween festivities. And of course the month-end deadline – which is always interesting in October. Usually I pretend that the 30th is the last day of the month, but this year the 30th was on a Thursday which is my meeting night, plus I was recently elected president of my networking group and that has me a little stressed out because of technical issues at our first leadership meeting. Technically, I voted by the group to be president, but wasn’t allowed to run the meeting. I was more like a referee which is hard considering that I, standing, am still shorter than the other guys, sitting. On Halloween day, The PaPa and The Girlfriend-in-Law came to visit for the weekend. They are still here and plan to leave on Tuesday (They voted early)
Also, since The Elder is in Kindergarten, they had a fall party and I got to volunteer (so much fun) and I even stayed to have lunch with him at the school. It was fun to meet his friends. I had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the partyI had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the party that all the friends he has been referring to whenever I pick him up were not really his friends, but were bullying and teasing him and he interpreted it as they were being his friends. I was heart broken and at a loss of what I needed to do. In real life, he had hit 2 kids in the lunchroom with his lunchbox and removed all of the clips off the centers board in the classroom because he wanted to do the Blocks Center and there wasn’t any more room for a 5th person. Then he threw his shoes and hit a little girl. I made him write apology notes to them and sent them with him to school on Friday. That made me a little nervous to enter his classroom because I didn’t know what kind of enemies he was making. What if the kids were looking at me with the disappointed look on their faces as if to say, “you are a bad mom.” I was afraid to meet the other parents because what if their child told them how disruptive he is in class and how he hurts people and throws things and behaves badly, etc etc. We always think the worst huh?
Well, to my delight, the friends he speaks of love him just as much as he love them. one even said he wanted to sit beside me at lunch and gave me a hug (he was only about a head shorter them me! yikes!) and then blew me kisses because it ended up that The Elder was sitting between us. The first thing I noticed was how young The Elder looks compared to the other children. He is only 5. There are 2 other girls in his class that are younger than he is, but he is the youngest boy by a lot.
I was however surprised at all the things that I was able to do though. I had very full but very productive days this week, catching up on somethings. Even the Meeting from Hades had a happy ending, and my training meeting went well, even though I didn’t train on what I had intended. I was able to rearrange my schedule to make sure I had my priorities in order. i squeezed in time to do this and I overestimated duration on some tasks and had some free time to do something random (obviously not blogging, but with the downgrade to XP, my web username and passwords were reset and it actually took me a long time to figure out how to get into the Wordpress Dashboard!). The more and more I deferred blogging (not to mention the many times I pushed the snooze on my phone alarm that reminds me to do Success Sunday posts) the more guilty I felt for not documenting the goings-on (and there was a lot going on). But finding this quote gave me some peace. I was busy and I was productive, but I would have never been that productive if I hadn’t been able to recalculate my schedule on the fly. Who would schedule themselves that packed from sun up to sun down? on purpose that is? So in essence I was doing the impossible.
Would it be possible for me to take a nap right now?

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Success Sunday (PostID 1276)

October 5, 2008 at 12:45 am

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“If we do it all together, we can both be first.”
–The Elder (10/1/2008)

The kids were helping clean up last Wednesday after dinner. Somehow I got them to believe it was some sort of game. I would give them an object (that didn’t belong in the kitchen) and ask “Where does this belong?” One of them would snatch it run through the house to put it away. They would actually whine if they weren’t the one to put it away!

“Hey I want to do it!”
“That was MY job!”

So I started giving out 2 objects at a time so they could both have something. So then it was a foot race.

“I’m first.”*They are learning ordinal numbers in kindergarten right now.
“I’m first.”
“No, you’re second because that’s after first.”*

This happened a couple of times before one time I heard them down the hall and this is what The Elder said to his brother. I couldn’t have been prouder! And cleaning the kitchen? Success! All it needed was a little teamwork!

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For the rest of the story…
When The Younger went to get the Shark to vacuum the kitchen rug**recall that The Younger loves to clean, I loaded The Elder down with multiple items that belonged in the play room.

“Let’s see how much you can carry at one time.”
“I can put it in this hand.”
“And this?”
“That doesn’t go in the play room, that goes downstairs.”
“Oh well then we will wait on that one. What else goes into the playroom.”
…
“Can you handle all of that?”
“Sure!”

*I noticed later when I went by the playroom, all of the things he had were on the floor just inside the doorway. Well, I did just say, ‘Put these in the playroom.’ Gotta love him being so literal! lolHis hands, mouth, underarms, and pockets were full of toys and dvds and the cord for his L-Max to plug into the TV. I was afraid that we going to drop something so I followed him and he stopped in the laundry room to say “hey, The Younger, look how much I have?”*

When he came back, politely asked “The Younger, can I do the vacuuming now?”

WHO ARE THESE CHILDREN???

I tried again today with less success. Figures…

Success Sunday (PostID 1125)

September 21, 2008 at 12:01 am

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“That isn’t to say we should stop collecting data, framing it in hypothesis, and testing those hypotheses. The scientific method is still an awesome machine…if we understand its limits.”
–Pquincy

OK, this is one of those “out of the box” quotes. It is from a blog…from a commenter…not my blog…but a blogger from Silicon Valley (so it is sorta related to this blog…bad joke, sorry, Dr. Pang, but hey, I’m sending you link love). He has a very witty blog tagline, and me likey witty.

So why this quote? Well it is two-fold. I understand that some bloggers are having difficulties commenting on my posts and I have a hypothesis of why that is. So I want to collect data to test that to verify if I can accept or reject that hypothesis. So if you are having difficulties commenting, please send me a note with your website address. If you CAN comment, please leave a comment to prove inform me that you can. My statistics degree and inner-nerd are becoming useful.

Secondly, if you get a chance to read Dr. Pang’s post and the subsequent comments (one of which is mine), the topic is about “imperfect knowledge” and Pquincy and I are basically speaking about the same thing, which I call faith.

That is what success is all about! Faith!

Yes there is drive, there is effort, there is knowledge, there is common sense, there are resources, communication, opportunity, status, position…there are a lot of things that can play a role in the success (or failure) of reaching a goal, but nothing allows us to reach as high as our potential without faith. Faith allows us to set a goal where the evidence to reach that goal is not present.Faith allows us to set a goal where the evidence to reach that goal is not present. I always teach the ladies I have the privilege to influence (oh yeah and my kids too) that if God puts a dream in your heart, then he also equips you to reach it. I think many people quit just before they break ground** I think of the story about the mustard seed. You know the biggest struggle for any seed is to break ground (especially if it was buried by a squirrel!). That is what determines if it grows or if it dies, succeeds or fails. Think about those that just fall on the ground for whatever reason. They have to really root themselves! “Bloom where you are planted” is one of the mantras I’ve been taught. and never see the reward of their efforts and struggles. That makes me so sad. They didn’t pass the test. The schools don’t give you a diploma if you don’t pass the tests. Why should we get it if we quit before Commencement? After all commencement does mean ‘beginning.’ So many people quit before they’ve even gotten started.

I’m not preaching here because I know that I’ve been guilty of it myself in so many different arenas. Now that I’ve been able to see successes in my life that I have worked for (as opposed to being handed and place on my lap for me), I realize the power God has given me. How hurt he must be that I went without faith for so long and living beneath my potential.

So if I may interpret this quote out of context of Pquincy’s comment: It is good to analyze situations – what you did to “win” and what you could do better or not at all. It will help you to gain additional knowledge and could possibly improve the outcome. However, over-analyzing can be a waste of time (believe me, I also have a C-personality). Some things are just better left to Him. Let go, and Let God.

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