Have any of you ever been in Walmart the day before Christmas? If your answer is no then consider yourself lucky because it is kind of how I would imagine hell. People are packed in the aisles like sardines and they all turn into angry procrastinators who are not able to remember their manners. That is assuming they actually previously possessed any. Pushing a shopping cart turns into bumper cars while walking without one is like entering the gauntlet of death full of swinging elbows and screechy cart wheels that nip at your heels. About five minutes into this experience your patience is shot and you have had it. You feel completely helpless and want to runaway screaming in hopes to warn others who are entering the store of the danger ahead. Anybody else ever felt like this? If you are a parent you have probably felt like this at one time or another when dealing with your own children.

I work at a place that has me dealing with children all day long. Some of them are quite pleasant while the others are; well let's just say they're not as pleasant. I have been kicked, spat on, licked, sworn at, pinched, and had trash cans thrown at me just to name a few. Believe it or not I have always been able to keep my cool. I have yet to perform any of those previously mentioned actions towards children. I'm not saying I haven't thought about it, but I haven't yet acted out my thoughts. For some reason while I'm on the job I can take the abuse and it doesn't seem like a big deal. I hereby dub myself the king of patience. Why is it that I can't keep this same level of patience with my own children? I come home from work feeling like Superman ready to conquer the world. When I enter the house my two little kryptonite kids put me in my place. Don't take me wrong, I love my kids and they are wonderful but sometimes I feel completely helpless when trying to maintain the sanity in my house. It is like everything I do at work that proves to be successful when working with kids is thrown out the window. When I am struggling to manage my kids my wife likes to remind me what I do for a living. She thinks it's pretty funny and I guess I can't blame her. It is kind of like being a dentist but not being able to get your own kids to have good oral hygiene. It just doesn't feel right.

I have come to the realization that nobody pushes our buttons quite like our own family. I don't care what anybody else in this world thinks of me so long as my family loves me. If some dude in the store swears at me it isn't a big deal. If my son says it to me it hurts a lot. I think that is why we sometimes lose our patience a lot with our kids. When we are helping them to learn good behaviors and to do what is right we put a lot of energy into it. If it doesn't work out then we feel like a failure and then we may take that out on them by yelling and losing our patience. This is something that we all need to work on as parents, especially myself. Kids are smart. If we continue to teach them in a loving manner they will turn out ok. They will still have their fair share of bumps in the road and we will feel like failures as parents but eventually our children will figure it out. What I am trying to say is that not only do we need to have patience with our own children but we need to have patience with ourselves. So let's all keep trudging along and remember that learning patience only comes from exposure to uncomfortable and unpleasant situations.