One of the things that we have learned as we have changed the way we live, is that we sometimes need to be creative. It’s easy to be all cavalier about how we live, when we are in our own home.
But take us out in public and put us around other people and you’ll notice some quirks.
Today, at the little’s preschool, it is ‘ice cream day‘. We received a notice earlier in the week that the ice cream man would be coming each friday until the end of summer.
“Please send in money if you would like your child to have some ice cream”.
I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit frustrated by this request.
While it wasn’t a mandatory request, as a parent, you struggle with wanting your kids to not feel left out. Yet at the same time, we are choosing to live in a different way and this clearly didn’t fit into that:
- We try to eat healthy, nutritious, whole non-processed foods.
- We are on a budget.
Of course, it would be really easy to cave and fall back to old ways, out of fear of judgement.
“Just buy the darn ice cream for your child. What’s it gonna hurt?”
But what is that teaching our children if we go against something we believe in, just so our children could have a fleeting, happy encounter with a nutritionally-empty ice cream cone?
Our solution? Randy made homemade strawberry and cream popsicles this morning. The boys were absolutely beaming as we took them up to the school for them to eat instead. To say the boys were thrilled to have “healthy ice cream” to take, would be an understatement!
Who knows… maybe all of the other kids will be the ones looking at them longingly.
As I said, living differently, in whatever way, takes a lot of thought, and determination.
Your Turn: How do you handle situations where others do things differently than you teach your children at home?
please note that the purpose of this post is not to judge others who choose to give their children ice cream (or whatever), but rather to explain how we solved a problem we’ve encountered. We want to serve as an encouragement to others – not a source of condemnation
