Flavour of the Day with Noora

The Unknown Sacrifices

How many times have you asked yourself, did my parents really sacrifice as much for me as I am sacrificing for my kids? 

For some reason, many of us find it hard to comprehend that our parents did in fact go through "all this parenting", and maybe even more. I think it puts some guilt on our shoulders knowing that we made their lives harder, and it raises our expectations from ourselves to pay them back with kindness, closeness, and obedience now that we are older. 

Throughout the day, 99% of the decisions I make revolve around my kids, whether I like it or not. When I wake up, when I go to sleep, what I do for entertainment, what I cook, what kind of job I can take and the list just goes on. 

At times, I feel it is too much, and in many cases, I childishly cry because I couldn't go after what I wanted. At other times, when my kids are having a good day, I feel very content and proud of every decision I have made. 

Whatever I am feeling, I just remind myself that mama-hood is a job at the end of the day, the more I invest the right kind of effort, the more it will pay off in the end. 

Flavour of the Day with Noora

Taking your child to a new school will put as much social pressure on you as it does on them. It doesn't matter that we are adults who have been through a majority of our life-milestones, we can still feel like 8-year-olds looking for new friends, hoping to fit in.I'm telling you, the pressure is all too familiar. Just as your child will be looking for a new group, so will you. You will survey other families to see one that you can befriend, deep down hoping that it will turn out to be a long-term friendship. You might feel a bit of the social pressures of doing things that will make your child fit in more, provided that they are not too extreme on your radar. And you might be extremely disappointed and uncomfortable when things get messy every now and then. Surveying schools for my almost three-year-old, I am extremely confused about what I should be looking for. I don't remember my parents obsessing about which school to put me in, I don't even remember that school was ever an issue or that changing schools was ever an option. However, talking with other parents with school-aged children, I feel that times now are so different. Do I look for a school that is strong academically and put up with extremely high tuitions, even though I know that tuitions are just the tip of the iceberg. Or do I go for a slightly less flashy school knowing that the academic indicator just went down a bit? From my experience, I feel that school is mostly about life skills more than anything else, but what does that mean in reality and how should it judge which school I choose?