Coconut Pineapple Oatmeal + Parenting WIN!

This delicious coconut pineapple oatmeal is made with the help of Hamilton Beach Rice Cooker. Change up your usual breakfast with the flavors of summer!

Sometimes parenting can be difficult. Parenting a teenager is just downright difficult. And nowadays it just becomes even more difficult. Parenting tactics our parents used are now obsolete. And while we can point fingers and blame, I loved a quote from our summer counseling conference that talked about the kids born after 1995. So many times we compare kids of today with what we were like as kids.

However, kids don't "get it." These kids nowadays have NO concept of living without technology. They have NO idea what it was like to not grow up with life and it's answers at their fingertips. Unfortunately it's also come with some drawbacks. And a need for us to learn how to parent BETTER.

And today was a parenting win. (I got approval from my friends after I implemented this idea so it was all good).

After three days of telling my teenage daughter to clean her room and WEEKS of telling her to get her clothes piles on the floor picked up and put away, I decided to take matters in my own hands. While the kids were at church I came home for a little bit and I cleaned her room...putting everything in bags and hiding it in the garage.

My daughter came home and sat down on the computer and I went over and closed it and reminded her she didn't get privileges until her room was cleaned. She looked at me and said, "I can be on the computer, my room is already cleaned!" In an effort to control my fury at her insensitiveness, I instead said, "yeah....I may have accidently mistaked it for the stuff that needed to go to Saver's. Whoops." She got all mad and asked where her stuff was. I told her I'd look through the donation stuff or the trash when she finished cleaning her room and bathroom. She cleaned her room and bathroom, but not until after dinner. So dinner was a festive and spirited conversation where she made every jab she could at my immaturity and how immature of a parenting style I had chosen to take.

I internally laughed because I could. She was MAD. I ruffled her and she was trying to come back and get the upper hand again. This was fun. I just sat there and enjoyed my taco salad and thought about how much fun it was to be a parent. My joy of teenage parenting was back!

And after she finished cleaning her bathroom and bedroom i let her know where her stuff was after I made her change out a load of laundry and put a new one in for me.

And then she did five or six walks of shame. Up the stairs and down the stairs with a new trash bag of stuff to put away. Lesson learned.

With my parenting win complete and a Monday morning now here, I headed out for the gym. I was so exhausted from my relaxing the day before!

So I plugged in the Hamilton Beach Rice Cooker and put my oatmeal inside and left for the gym.

it was ready when I got home. I topped it with some pineapple and coconut and sat down and listened to the kids complain about their chore list for the day and wonder what was for breakfast. It was a gloriously normal summer morning. I sat there and let the pineapple and coconut bring me back into my "I'm relaxing on the beach listening to the waves" daydream for approximately 1.6424 seconds until I heard "Mooooom!!!"

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

I was given a Hamilton Beach Good Thinking Rice Cooker as a Hamilton Beach Ambassador. The Hamilton Beach Rice Cooker works for grain cereals as well as rice. The opinion of the product is my own.