We do not have to be perfect and present everything as it would look on Pinterest. Our best is good enough in the eyes of our kids!
A few weeks ago as I was finishing up McKenna’s birthday cake, I shook my head and laughed at myself and thought, “This is definitely not ‘Pinterest worthy.'”
I am no cake decorator. It is something I think would be fun to learn, but at this point in life, I have not. Kids like fun cakes, though, so I do my best.
As I finished up my thought, McKenna came into the room and gasped with excitement. She loved it! I then thought, “It might not be ‘Pinterest worthy,’ but it is certainly child worthy.”
Child worthy!
And isn’t that really what matters? What was I making the cake for? My child. Definitely not Pinterest.
And I think as you look at the pictures of cakes I have made, you will likely think, “Those aren’t so bad!” And they aren’t. They aren’t so bad. But they definitely wouldn’t shine on Pinterest! Ha! And that is okay.
You know what else? If the Internet didn’t exist, I would probably be pretty proud of my cakes (though a couple of them wouldn’t exist because I found inspiration on the Internet).
There are so many different ways we can compare ourselves to other parents. We can compare how clean their house is to ours, how balanced their meals are compared to ours, how patient they are compared to us, how many fun projects they do compared to us, how many cookies they bake compared to us…and as if simply looking to other homes and moms and imagining what is going on behind those doors wasn’t enough to make women feel inferior, we now have the Internet and sites like Pinterest to remind us in our moments of triumph that once someone did it better.
But who really cares how good mine was compared to someone else? Definitely not McKenna. My cake was child worthy. It was McKenna worthy.
So in my final moments of cake decorating, I should think, “McKenna will love this. This is McKenna worthy.”
The next time you find yourself in a self-deprecating moment, take a step back and think look at your child. Was it child worthy? If so, then no matter how you did it, you did it perfectly.
