While my gorgeous little boy sleeps on the couch beside me, i have a few precious minutes to jot down some words.
I'm finding parenthood such an incredible experience. Reduced to tears from sheer exhaustion some days, and other days i just stare into his perfect little face and think how amazing it is that we now have a little person to love so much, and wonder in amazement at the things we will be able to teach him, i imagine his first steps, and first words, and how great it will feel when he reaches out to me for a hug. I think about our fights when he's a teenager, and that brings me to the reason for this blog.

There is so much I told myself as a teenager that i would remember, so I didn't make my kids feel quite so bad as I felt once upon a time.
Parents look at teenagers and think they are lazy, that they have no responsibilities and all the freedom and they don't appreciate any of it. Of course that is the case, when i think back to high school i think how easy life was in some ways.. but i never want to forget that in many ways my teen years were so hard, i prefer the life i have now and i never want to go back.

My last year of high school I often felt lost. I didn't know what to do with my life and leaving high school felt like leaving my safety net behind. I was good at school, I was scared of the real world, a world i had NO IDEA what i wanted to do, and everywhere i turned people were asking "what are you going to do for a living? what are you going to achieve?"
I spent my high school years trying to acheive! and i did well. Was it that much to ask that I had a year or two to NOT achieve much? to just live? and when i went to uni and failed miserably, it was a rather low point. And it didn't help that everyone still somehow expected achievements.
Don't forget that feeling. 17 is hard. be easy on this little fella when he is 17.

When i was 15 i saw an ad in the paper for working in american summer camps. And it became a dream of mine. It wasn't a dream that people identified with, not teachers and parents anyway. I only realised this morning during some good meditation, that it really was my dream, and i really did achieve it and it made me feel amazing. A lot of people asked me if i was going back to uni, and didn't seem to realise i had just made my DREAM COME TRUE! it was a big deal!
And i'm truly appreciating now, years later, that it doesn't matter that I am slowly working on a three year degree that has already taken me seven years and is still incomplete. Because, although its on my to-do list, its not my dream. And i made a dream come true. I have already achieved a dream and i feel great about it!
so, I will keep reminding myself, don't think you know Tyson's dreams better than he does. His dream might not be something that sounds amazing to me, but it might be the one thing he wants more than anything.
Sometimes, i may NOT know whats best for him, and he might. Keep open to that idea, hard as it may be.

Its hard to imagine that this tiny little boy will grow up to be taller than me one day, at the moment its even hard to imagine that he might sleep through the night and not cry for me 2 minutes after i leave the room. But it will happen, and I want to always remember that while teenage years were fun, i felt lost a lot of the time. And hopefully I can help Tyson through those years with minimal scars and a bit of guidance.