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Great Chocolate Treats: Friendships and Fixing Bad Days #KinderMOM

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My kids have clearly hit the October/November blahs at school. They leave in the morning a bit slower than they did in September and they have been coming home a lot less cheery than when the sun was out in full force. My one daughter is having some challenges with getting there again and she is upset often on returning home. There have been some issues with some other kids in class that are not easy to solve at all. This weighs heavily on a sensitive anxious child. The other day a big box of Kindersurprises arrived and I was planning to hold them for tomorrow night and give them out at Halloween. But I cracked them open to brighten her day.

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These are some of the cool new toys from Kindersurprise for 2013. This is a cute little stamper, there are new stickers, cars, and dinosaurs too. There are soft bellies and dozens of special new treasures to play with this coming year.

It’s upto you how you use them. That’s the beauty of Kindertoys. This past year we hid some for our annual adoptive families Easter Egg hunt, we gave them out to my youngest daughter’s grade two class and we shared a few with my nephew who rarely gets sweets, but occasionally enjoys a special treat with a toy inside from Aunt Paula. We gave several out at the door for Halloween and had planned to keep the big box of Kindersurprise toys safe and unopened until tomorrow night.

But when kids come home in tears worried about too many big adult things and you need to put a smile back on their face, well that is happily easy to accomplish with Kindertoys. That night, after they went to bed I snuck two into each girl’s lunch. I figured they could both use them as a bridge to build or reward a friend for being there, even when they aren’t feeling the best. For my oldest daughter, a perfectionist who tends to be anxious, this year has been traumatic watching a friend struggle with mental health issues at school. My daughter is a fixer and destined to be a teacher or an occupational therapist or mental health therapist of some sort when she grows up. She has a big heart. So I wasn’t super shocked when she called me from school crying her eyes out one morning last week over something that upset her. She wanted to come home, but managed to work through the problem at school. Half an hour after the upset phone call, she rang back to tell me everything was all better because she hid a Kindersurprise in her friend’s pocket. The other girl found it and the tension between them was defused. My girl, my heart. I totally knew who she would give that egg to the day I stuck it in her lunch. Grateful I am not to be a tween these days. Lucky I am to have a growing toolkit. Thanks, Kinder.

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And in the end here there were some smiles, relief, and joy replaced worry.

Now, I’m not for one minute suggesting here that children’s mental health issues can be solved with chocolate and a toy. But occasionally, when nothing else is working and the joy seems to be hard to find, you get creative, find a new tool and add it to your parenting toolkit. This week we added Kindersurprises to ours and we shared the joy.

Disclosure: I’m part of the Kinder® Mom program and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.”

Mom of two beautiful active girls, traveller, fitness junkie, social media consultant, and keeper of the sanity.

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