Armed and Dangerous... With a Spork!

I love my step - children they are the best thing in the world, but sometimes I feel as though I have no control over certain aspects of my life because they are inadvertantly controlled by someone else..... So instead of throwing my head back and screaming in frustration to the sky that really does not care either way , I will grab my spork & yell a battle cry! My best friends in the whole wide world, know all about my little obsession with the sporks.... and it all started with this goofy blog that called my name:

Adventures in step-parenting
Or Where's My Spork?

By Ken Jessup, Guest Blogger

Experience convinced me marrying into an existing family as a step-parent is like parachuting behind enemy lines. At midnight. Naked. Armed only with a spork. A dirty one.
Leadership expects you to win the war with that spork. Crazy? Oh, yes. But if you always remember, "Your Spork is Your Friend," you have a chance.
Why? Because good parents create a private dictionary between themselves and their children that's written in tones of voice, body language, "looks," in-jokes, private references, touch, smell and even presence. All contribute to the enormous bandwidth of communication between parents and children.
A step-parent trying to enter that guarded, private world is an alien, often an unwelcome one. Only time and experience will teach voice, touch, all the unspoken agents of communication, and they will be new voices, new touches, new jokes and references and smells complementing previous ones. A step-parent's sense of humor is his or her best tool to open that private dictionary and keep it open.
A sense of humor doesn't mean always laughing, smiling. It's about realizing your inner spork--you're attempting the impossible with the unusable. It's about realizing how ridiculous it is there's no way for you to do what you need to do--yet somehow you do it anyway.
A sense of humor and a healthy perspective also keep everyone sane by helping to defuse stress situations. Hard to scream when you realize your tantrum is ridiculous.So grab your spork and get out there, and fight on!

Now if this is hard, what is real parenting like? :)