Sunday, January 28, 2007

Being a Good Role Model (or Not!)

All the parenting books and teaching methods books stress the importance of modeling behaviors for kids, i.e. if you want the kids to be kind and gentle, you have to be kind and gentle yourself. If you want the kid to not be such a perfectionist, you need to demonstrate laughing at and/or learning from your mistakes. This is all well and good, until it comes to procrastination.

Klaus's college app is due February 1. That's Thursday. Four days (or less, depending on how we send it). With much nagging and browbeating, he is finished with his essays, the letters of recommendations have been requested, Dad is mostly finished with the financial aid forms, but I have not even started the "parent's recommendation" essay yet. Bad Mommy.

Bad role model! It's not much use for me to give him the "you have to stop waiting 'til the last minute" speech when I'm sitting here blogging about what a procrastinator I am instead of just writing the stupid essay. ;-)

Sure, I have lots of reasons for not having done it yet (we don't even know if we're going to let him go to college in the fall so why bother?) and a long history of avoiding writing college app essays (my mother had to confine me to my room for a week to get me to apply to college.) Plus he's sitting here looking at me and who can be expected to think in such an environment?!?!?!

Sigh.

I guess I'd better start writing now...

3 comments:

Zany Mom said...

My mother once wrote a recommendation essay on an application (not college) and to this day I still feel sad when I remember that it wasn't very flattering.

So, write something flattering! And get cracking so you can come out and play!!

Vicki said...

Lol, I want an update!! I stumbled on this post by playing with my 'referals'. So when I saw your page, I came to visit. It's pretty cool to think someone was reading this far back in a blog when they clicked out. So now I'll need to go look and see if you posted that essay!

It's funny how fast life changes. January 2007, my daughter was planning on going to Germany for college. Instead she has been accepted to the Fire Academy and starts January 2008. She will graduate from the Fire Academy one month after she turns eighteen.

ttyl,
Vicki

The Princess Mom said...

Vicki,

I had to overnight the app. ;-) As it turns out, the school counselor was even more of a procrastinator than I was, as were two of his three referral letters. And we wonder why he wasn't accepted until mid-July...