Hey everyone welcome to a series on how to fail …! We are aware of how on a daily basis we are bombarded by endless beautifully curated images, stories of success and of things we should strive for, do or aspire to be…

We know that this constant message can get overwhelming and can sometimes lead us into a negative spiral of destructive thoughts, anxiety, comparison, of feeling not enough, where we magnify our failures and our “flaws” to our detriment. This can feel very isolating and even depressing.  As a blogger and one who didn’t want to contribute to this narrative, I have realized lately I may have failed.

Although we have succeeded in lots of ways (if you’ve ever looked at our Instagram you’ll see it’s not exactly “pretty”) but it really does only show us “happy and on successful outings with the kids”. I guess that’s where I feel we’ve failed, and although I understand why we haven’t talked or written about this, because for instance when the shits hitting the fan no one wants to get the camera out and take photo evidence of that!😂📸 But like anyone we have days like this and “adventures” that totally were not a “success”! Mostly we have communicated this by not communicating this aka radio silence 👉classic!…

But I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately on failure, and how learning to fail ultimately helps you succeed. And so I’m going to lay out my recent biking adventure failure in which (naughty mum), I did take a photo of my kid crying after he fell off his bike. I guess I’d just like everyone to know that sometimes we get this outdoor malarkey with the kids wrong too, but we keep trying and sometimes we have great success! Always a good story at the very least! Here goes…

So apparently things have changed, the tables have been flipped as happens on this parenting journey. Normally it went like this 👉Hey kids today we are going surfing/mountain biking/bush walking etc so get your gear. And off we’d go. Sweet.

A few weekends ago my partner and I had it all planned out, he would pick up the kids (who’d stayed the night with the grandparents) and while he did that I’d get some food together and all of our warm biking gear etc and we’d go off for an awesome day mountain biking in the Redwoods= yippee! 🚲 I had everything ready when they got home, they literally just needed to hop in the car. Except my eldest son, who is 9 3/4 years old) did not want to go! Crap and what!? He wanted to go fishing!! Hmm… so we tried reasoning, nope, we tried pointing out that it was 3 against 1 and he’d just have to come, nope more tears, we tried saying he’d have to stay in the car while we went riding (an empty treat)…, he held fast, nope still not coming, damn! Called my bluff! In the end he went fishing while the two of us sat there wondering how to navigate this new situation! Then 💡 my partner had an idea, what about if instead of a long mountain bike ride we went to Summer hill MTB park and rode the dirt jumps? To which we received a loud and clear YES! Oh thank goodness! Apparently he had tired legs and just didn’t want to do a long ride, a short fun ride however was definitely doable. Hooray!! We got there in the end!

Here we are on our ride, a little later than planned but hey better late than never!😁

All was going really well until my 7 year old took a tumble… luckily I was equipped with plasters and a lolly.  Sigh… some days! But we will try again. Winning and failing equally.

Learning always.

Thanks

Tammy