Mom Struggles!!!

Do any other moms have trouble planning fun things for their kids and then their kids misbehave and can't participate in the fun activity???

I ran into this very problem when I tried to plan a fun Christmas activity. 
Kynlee and I had made sugar cookies earlier that day, and for Family Home Evening we planned to decorate the cookies and then take them around to our neighbors. 

Unfortunately Kynlee was not willing to eat her dinner that night. We had told her that she couldn't decorate cookies if she didn't eat her dinner. We were hoping that threat would motivate her to eat, but when she wouldn't we were forced to follow thru with the consequences. 

We started decorating with the babes, but Carson and I were both in bad moods by this time. Carson was in a double bad mood because he doesn't like decorating cookies anyway.

What was supposed to be so fun ended up being such a bad experience.

Well actually our babes all had lots of fun.

Here's a nice fake smile so we can always remember this memorable night.

Pretty soon Carson was bundling up the babes so we could go around the neighborhood and I was decorating cookies all by myself.

What fun!

 The next night we made little reindeer cookies to take with us to Moab. Kynlee ate her dinner that night and we all had way more fun. Not only did the reindeer cookies turn out really cute, they were way easier than traditional sugar cookies.

Parenting is really hard when I don't want to take away my children's privileges just as much as they don't want me to take them away. Maybe someday I will figure out a better method, but probably not any time soon because I am really good at struggling with this whole Mom thing.