Creating Parenting

The best advice my kids’ pediatrician gave me was to stop reading parenting magazines, to remember that the only required baby item was a car seat (and some Vaseline for a boy!), and to never—I repeat, never—Google a child’s sickness or symptoms. To rebel against this advice would mean absorbing too much information, too much stress, too much debt…and a penis rash.

Since then, I have managed to stay far away from any article that has parenting 101 tips. I’ve also decreased the number of times I have diagnosed my children based on the first three results that show up on Google. It’s largely been instinct and experience that have maneuvered me up and down this child-raising roller coaster. Scratch that. Actually, it’s really been my passion for creativity that has painted some of my parenting perspectives and techniques. And, they’re nothing you’d find in most parenting books or forums. Why? Because I like to go against the grain...to make parenting more, well, creative. Instead of having to decide which side to join in the mommy wars (breastfeed vs. bottle-feed, hands-on vs. hands-off discipline, homeschooling vs. public schooling, blah, blah, blah), let’s get creative. Let’s build our kids with vivid colors and shapes instead of breaking them down with the mundane. Let’s inspire them—they are, after all, blank canvases. Let’s paint them not the way we want to see them…but instead how they want to be seen. It is this craving to talk about creative parenting that inspires this blog, which I affectionately named the ‘Mom-o-logue’. Stay tuned for different paint brushes and colors.