Trading SpongeBob for Tiaras

I'll admit it, I'm one of those moms who lets their young children watch SpongeBob SquarePants. Occasionally. It used be more than occasionally, until my five-year-old daughter, Sallie announced loudly to whoever was listening, "Everything I know, I learned from Mommy and Daddy and SpongeBob." After that, we didn't see SpongeBob for a while.

In my defense, when you have a child like Sallie, who started crawling at five months, stood up in her crib at five-and-a-half months, and has hardly been able to sit still since, there comes a time when you will put on whatever TV show will actually keep her attention for the full 30 minutes. It took me a good deal of trial and error before I discovered that that show was SpongeBob.

I'm happy to report that today, in the name of creating more joy in our household, we traded SpongeBob for craft time, and the girls made their own tiaras (or tiarias, as Sallie calls them). I have, historically, done a lot of crafts with the girls, but, with all of the time they've been spending outdoors, it seems that more and more time indoors has been spent in front of the TV. (Especially during these, the dog days of summer). And so today we turned off the TV, and I watched in amazement and pure joy (oh, right, it's supposed to be about their joy!) as they entertained themselves for a full hour making tiarias.

One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Jill Churchill, who said, "The most important thing she'd learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one." Indeed.