Dear Daughter,
The whole point of this blog is to share with you all my learnings I have so far in life, so it is only natural that I should include my best parenting tips here too. Since you are my daughter, I know that you are blocking out most of what I say so I will need to make sure I include them here so that you can look back in case you decide to have a family one day.
When you and your brother were younger you used to always fight in the car (well, you actually still do), which made each car ride feel like torture. For some reason this became more of an issue every summer when we went to Sweden because we would spend a lot of time driving between parents, siblings and friends to spend as much time as possible with everyone before we headed back to the states. Since we have a lot of forest in Sweden I came up with this brilliant idea to keep you from fighting and making you sit quietly.
I told you that the trees that had a colored plastic ribbon wrapper around them (you know those ribbons that indicate to the forest maintenance company which tree should be saved and which one needs to be cut down) was the place where you dropped off kids that misbehaved to the trolls. Growing up my grandmother always told me stories about trolls stealing kids, so I was just passing on the tradition. The trolls were always listening for kids that were fighting and whining because then they knew that they could go to the trees and pick them up shortly after. You didn’t buy into this story, but your brother did and I appreciate you playing along since it made our car rides more pleasurable. Stellan would sit perfectly still in the car trying to spot a Troll on our rides. So I admit, maybe not the best parenting trick, but it worked. Your brother behaved and I got to pass along a stories about trolls like generations in our family have done in the past. There might have been a couple of times when Stellan was afraid to go to Sweden because of the trolls, but that is a story for another day…..
I’m not saying that I’m an expert on everything, so up to you which of my advice you decide to follow :)
