Bluey made me cry

So Bluey is an Australian-based children’s show that follows the Heeler family and their daily life. The father, Bandit, is a normal goofy dad and the mother, Chilli, is a typical loving motherly caregiver. They have two daughters, Bluey (6) and Bingo (4) who have big personalities and even bigger imaginations.

While most episodes are about teaching the kids some life lessons, there are a few that are more about teaching the parents some important lessons. The biggest one that I have seen so far would be season 2, episode 50 “Baby Race”.

This episode starts out with Bluey hanging from the monkey bars and Bingo trying with the help of Chilli, their mother. Bingo starts comparing herself to her sister and then Judo, one of her friends. She asks her mom if she is the best at the monkey bars and her mom tries to tell her to run her own race, but she keeps pushing the subject so Chilli decides to sit her down and tell her the story of her first steps.

The story starts with Bluey being the first to roll over in Chilli’s mom group. She was trying to show off when Wendy (Judo’s mom) tells how Judo is already sitting up on her own. This was the start of the baby race.

The next step was crawling, and while Chilli tried her hardest, Bluey decided it was easier to roll where she wanted to go.

This is where the episode started to hit home because my first kid did the exact same thing. She almost skipped crawling entirely because she was able to roll everywhere she wanted to go.

The next mom’s group meeting Judo was crawling around everywhere while Bluey was rolling everywhere. Chilli even went to the doctor only for them to tell her this was perfectly normal.

The next few scenes were Chilli looking at every parenting book she could find to help her while Bandit was in the background looking tired and comically taking care of the late-night baby care.

Bluey looked like she was ready to take off crawling only for her to go backwards. Chilli looked disappointed while Bandit was cheering and laughing. Next, they were at Nana Heeler’s house and she tried her version of an old-fashioned fix by putting olive oil on her knees telling them that “when she figures out she can’t crawl she will learn to walk” while we see baby Bluey laughing and her knees sliding.

After they snuck out of that situation, it was time for mom’s group again where Bluey was crawling everywhere backward and Judo was pulling herself up on furniture which, as Chilli tells us, is the step right before walking.

Later we see Chilli not at mom’s group and later we see Bella (Coco’s mom) finding her on her back steps watching Bluey play outside. Bella shows Chilli a picture of her family and all nine of her kids and mentioned how she has definitely learned a thing or two.

After a little talk about how every kid runs at their own pace, Bella ends the conversation by putting her hand on Chilli’s shoulder and telling her “You’re doing great” and you can see the tears in Chilli’s eyes.

This is where the very real tears started filling my eyes. I have three kids of my own and I do feel like I am failing very frequently.

While I am very lucky to have a support system that has helped me along my parenting journey, sometimes I wish that instead of giving me advice when I struggle they would just take the time to tell me “You’re doing great”.

Now don’t get me wrong, most of the advice was welcome and the assistance was definitely helpful, but sometimes I just wanted to be told that even through all the struggles I was still doing a great job.

The only thing that I can compare it to is when sometimes you just want to vent about your day without any true response just so that you can verbalize your frustrations and get them off your chest. You don’t always want a response.

Parenting is hard, like really hard. Once you think you got it figured out then life throws something else at you, especially with multiple kids.

If you haven’t checked out this show it's available on Disney+ and I seriously recommend it. Even if you think your kids aren’t old enough to get anything out of it, I think that you will.