Quill / Moments / Quotes for the tired parent
Quotes for the tired parent
It's seven o'clock and you've been patient for about eleven hours. Dinner got refused again. You raised your voice at bedtime, and now you're standing in the kitchen feeling terrible, next to a fish finger.
Parents who talk honestly about this period mention lowering the bar, and giving up on the families in their feed. Sharing the night, where there's someone to share it with, comes up a lot. So does prepping things ahead and taking help when it's offered, even when it arrives with opinions.
These lines are written for the third wake-up, and they're tired too. They keep out of sleep routines and feeding, because that's for people who know your child. If the exhaustion or the feelings won't shift, a doctor is worth telling.
The moments
- The third wake-up of the night
- Patient all day, then snapping at bedtime
- Feeling terrible after raising your voice
- Standing in the kitchen at 7pm with nothing left
- Dinner refused, again
- A rare quiet moment, and you're too tired to enjoy it
- Not quite recognising yourself
What people say helps
- Lowering expectations and giving up comparison
- Handing over, or stepping out for a few minutes, when close to the edge
- Accepting help and sharing the night shifts
- Doing bottles and food ahead of time
“Enjoy every moment” and “it goes so fast” are usually said by people who got a full night's sleep.
Quill Originals are written by Quill. Popular sayings are widely repeated lines with no name attached. Lines with a name are checked word for word against public-domain books.
Quill Originals
You've done plenty today.
You've turned up thousands of times. That's what love looks like on paper.
Tonight's vegetable is the idea of a vegetable.
You're better at this than you think, and nobody has told you that today.
Laughing together at dinner beat everything on your list.
Awake again and they're fine. You're the one who's tired.
Frozen food was invented for evenings like this.
Fed-ish counts.
You're not behind. There's no race and nobody's holding a clipboard.
Nobody posts the bit where the photo took nineteen attempts.
You wore odd shoes to the shop. Nobody clocked it, or they've been there.
Crying in the car park is a recognised activity.
Your limit is real. Reaching it is part of being a person.
Close the app. Your kid has no idea what a sensory bin is.
Waiting in the car outside practice is a kind of love.
You've eaten lunch standing up since spring.
Forgot the bag, the wipes and possibly your name. You still got there.
You can say it's hard out loud. You're still a good parent when you say it.
Try again at breakfast.
The fridge has three yoghurts and half a cucumber. You've done more with less.
Five minutes on the floor with them beats a tidy hour.
Put the phone down. Sleep if you can.
Popular sayings
Listen to understand, not to reply.
Wherever you are, be all there.
Pick your battles.
From the books
The great thing is the education of character.
Read the passage around this line
“You’ll catch all that up. They’re such clever children. The great thing is the education of character. That’s what I learn when I look at your children.”
How cheaply happiness can be given!
Read the passage around this line
Even a kind look will give pleasure and confer happiness. In one of Robertson of Brighton’s letters, he tells of a lady who related to him “the delight, the tears of gratitude, which she had witnessed in a poor girl to whom, in passing, I gave a kind look on going out of church on Sunday. What a lesson! How cheaply happiness can be given! What opportunities we miss of doing an angel’s work! I remember doing it, full of sad feelings, passing on, and thinking no more about it; and it gave an hour’s sunshine to a human life, and lightened the load of life to a human heart for a time!”
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The child can never stray too far for the mother's love to follow.
Read the passage around this line
Love is to every human being what mother love is to the erring child. No son or daughter has ever fallen so low as to get beyond a mother's love. When society has turned its back on the outcast, when the prison door closes behind him, when companions have fled, when sympathy and mercy have departed, when the world has forgotten, the mother remembers and loves her child. She visits her boy in the "death house," her daughter in the dens of vice in the slums. The child can never stray too far for the mother's love to follow. It is the most perfect prototype of our Father-Mother-God's love.
Praise and encouragement will do infinitely more for children than threats and punishment.
One should have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do.
Whosoever is out of patience, is out of possession of his soul.
The human mind is so constructed that it resists rigour, and yields to softness.
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