NO THANK YOU

We hear it all the time from our little ones..."no!" They have such an easy time saying it, in fact, I think they find it fun;)

There's many ways to say that lovely phrase. My son loves to shake his head back and forth, while he smiles at me to suggest, "no way MaMa." Then there's the polite version that my dear friend always said, “no, thank you.” Society has led us to believe that it's good to be busy. In fact, the fear of missing out affects many of us. Ever since I was young, my family joked that I always wanted to be where the better time was. I would wait until the last possible minute to make plans because I needed to evaluate all that was going on and then go to where the better time would be.

Maybe that's why we've seemed to say yes to too many activities lately. There's no reason we need to be at a birthday party every day of the weekend for a month straight. But, how would my child feel if everyone at school was talking about the fun time they had at the party and my kid wasn't there?

And who knew I needed to budget for a birthday party fund? "Hey kids, you could have gone to college but instead you went to birthday parties;)" Maybe I need to take heed of my toddler and use the same words, “NO! …thank you”

I didn’t realize that learning to say no was so important until I saw the sad look on my daughter’s face as we were coming home from an extravagant birthday party. They had made adorable fairy gardens and I, myself had admired the sweet blue fairy my daughter had placed amongst the shimmery pebbles. When I asked why the long face, she acknowledged that someone had asked her to trade fairies and she had said yes, even though she didn’t want to trade.

We've all been in that situation. Someone asks us to do something that we don't really want to do and we find ourselves roped into being agreeable, only to feel sick when we allow ourselves to be a doormat for others. If only we could learn the art of saying, “no.” In the same respect that the answer is “no” unless you ask, we allow “yes” to be our default, until we refine our way of saying, “no.”

I gave away my favorite doll as a child because someone asked. It was only the beginning of the more important things I would give away later on because I never learned to say 'no'. I don’t want my children to go through life compromising what’s important to them just to please someone, who they won’t even know 5 years from now.

So, while we sat in traffic on the way home, we started to practice. I asked her to give me things she likes and she replied with, “no, thank youJ” Every now and again, I’ll try to catch her off guard when we’re around the house and say something like, “Give me all your Halloween candy” so she can smile at me and say, “no thank you.” I never thought I’d be teaching my children to say “no” or love hearing her response when she does, but now we both have the opportunity to practice;)

#no #birthdayparties #nothankyou