Hugs or High Fives - Amuse Bouche #3

Welcome to Amoose Bouche where you get just a little bit of Bridget before our weekly launch of Dinner Plus Drinks on Sundays. This week I'm sharing a few tips of things that we're trying out with our kids that may or may not be helpful in your life. So here we go. For starters this week, I apologize. My voice is on the fritz. Um I got the cold that I get every year, usually in the fall, I got in July, I guess. So I'm doing my best here. This is much better than it was four days ago. I waited as long as I could to record, so bear with me. Um, so you may have noticed in the beginning that I said, quote, a few things we're trying out. Because let me tell you, my husband and I, we are not experts in parenting on any means. By any means. I mean, he might be. He's a natural with kids. Um, when I say he, I mean my husband. But we just like every other mom and dad out there, are just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. So we have two kids, a five-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, and there's a lot of pressure uh in the world these days, I think, to make sure our kids are perfect. So we feel that like everybody else, as much as we try not to, and we try to let them just be kids and grow up. Um, but you know, my parents are constantly saying, man, when we were kids, you know, we walked uphill both ways in the snow to school, or your car seats were basically just buckets in the back of the car. What are these crazy car seats you have your kids in these days? So it is funny to see um in 30-some years how much it's evolved. So um last week, if you've been listening to these Moose Bush episodes in order, I talked about boundaries. Now I was specifically talking about uh family vacations and kind of how to create boundaries in that way, but um it carries on over to this week, and one of the things we try and do with our kids is understand that they may not want to give everybody a hug. So sit back and think about that for a minute. You know, we're so used to saying to our kids, okay, go hug XYZ goodbye, or go give them a kiss, say goodbye. Um, what if our kids know at a much earlier age that maybe they're not comfortable with that? Um, I've been telling my friends that as we come out of this COVID haze that we've all been in for a year, it turns out that I don't really like hugging. And I don't mean that like, of course, I will give you a hug on your wedding day or whatnot, but I don't need to hug you every time I see you and every time we say hello and every time we say goodbye. It's just not a thing that I found that I missed during COVID, where a lot of people around me really missed hugging. So I'm thinking, huh, what if I pass that along to my kids and they don't really like hugging, but here I am forcing them to hug grandma and grandpa goodbye or one of my friends goodbye or whoever. Um, so what we have done with our kids because our five-year-old is old enough to express his feelings. He can be like, nah, mom, I don't want to give them a hug. Uh, but let me tell you, he's super affectionate and he wants to give everyone a hug. But my daughter, she doesn't care. She, you can tell, like sometimes she wants to, sometimes she doesn't. So uh one of the things we do, we just call it hugs or high fives. So we do, of course, want to teach them to be polite and like, hey, say goodbye to people when they're leaving. So we just do hugs or high fives, hugs or high fives, and they have the choice to go around and give everybody a high five or give them a hug. So that way they're still acknowledging the person that's leaving, they're stopping what they're doing to say goodbye, but they can just give them a high five if they want. And we have found it to be super fun, um, successful, and it's taught, you know, it specifically, let's just use my parents as an example. They're used to just hugging everyone goodbye, right? This was not a thing that was really discussed when we were kids, but for some reason, now in our generation, you know, it's in the forefront of our discussion. So it's really helped my parents to understand too that hey, uh, you know, we're not gonna force our kids to give hugs. Of course they love you. Um, you know, of course they are sad to see you go, but they might just want to be goofy and give you a high five. So it's been really kind of a fun way to do it. So if you have kids and you're you haven't thought about that, take a second and be like, huh, maybe my kid doesn't want to hug everybody. This, this, like, maybe my kid doesn't want Aunt Gertrude's slimy, slabberry kisses on both of her cheeks, right? That's kind of what it always makes me think of. So hugs or high fives is a really great thing we're doing with our kids that I'm proud of. And one other thing that you may want to take into your life, uh, this could be if you have kids or if you don't have kids. Um, we wanted to make sure that we sat at the dinner table and had a meaningful conversation of some sort. Now, if you have kids, you probably know that dinner time um is a ridiculous thing. There's food being all over, I would say being thrown everywhere, but that makes it sound barbaric. But there is always a mess of food on the floor. Dinner time lasts like if we're lucky, eight minutes, you know, that we're all sitting down, not running and getting more noodles or another cup of milk or whatever. It's not many consistent minutes that we're sitting or consecutive minutes that we're sitting at the table. But when we are, we always do highs and lows. So you can call it highs and lows, joys and concerns, whatever you want. You know, we opted for highs and lows because our kids are still young and that was easy for them to understand. Um, our daughter's two, so uh so she doesn't quite participate as much, but our son loves it. Um he tells people when they're over for dinner, like, hey, we're doing highs and lows. And it is exactly what it sounds like. We sit at the dinner table, we talk about the high part of our day and the low part of our day. There are no rules. You don't have to have a low part, you don't have to have a high part. You can have three lows and two highs. You can you can do whatever you want. But the whole point of this exercise was to get our kids talking. It's like one of my biggest fears that our son specifically is going to grow up and not feel comfortable talking about his feelings, right? Or bullying is a huge, you know, stressor of mine. I'm very, very scared for like the middle school bullying phase. And I want to make sure both of our kids know that they can talk to us about it, whether it's good or bad. So I actually was challenged one time. We were at my in-laws for dinner, and my son said, Okay, it's highs and lows, and he made everybody at the table do it. Um, and my father-in-law said, Well, why do you feel like you have to have him talk about his low part of the day too? Why can't it just be high parts? And I was like, Well, that's actually the more important part, I would argue. Um, of course, we love hearing about the good parts, and but those are the parts that easily come out. Like, hey mom, we made tie-dye today. Hey mom, I got to watch a movie today. But he is much more cautious to come out and say, hey mom, someone was mean to me on the playground. So the Lowe's part of this is the secret weapon. It's really to get your kids talking at the dinner table. You might find out some really, you know, helpful information that you may not have otherwise. Because honestly, we have. Uh, it's really easy to just sit there and say, hey, how was your day? Good. We get stuck in that rut already, and they're not even teenagers yet, so I can't imagine what it's gonna be like when they hate us. So, two helpful things that we're doing in our house. Yes, we do it because we have kids, but I think that even if you're just um if you have you're living with your partner, um, just a roommate, it's it's a little bit of a conversation starter and it may lead to something else or uh unbury some problem or start some story. You never know. So it's just a really great way to start a conversation, highs and lows. And then if you are looking for a way to maybe get out of those sloppy Aunt Gertrude kisses, try hugs or high fives. So those are my two quick little tips this week for making your days a bit more successful, hopefully. Again, we're all just doing our best and trying here. So thanks so much for bearing with my voice this week. I hope it will be better next week, and this will not be so painful for you to listen to. Have an awesome weekend, and we will see you on Dinner Plus Drinks. Bye-bye.