Mar 12
In spite of my chattering on here day after day, I am hesitant to give advice about families and marriage relationships and rearing children. I have no confidence what we have done will work for anyone else because no one else has the secret ingredient in our family recipe: the perfect husband and father who has lived with our family since, well, since our family began. Read more
I was on the edge of my seat, not because State of the Union addresses are particularly gripping, but because our president was calling for better opportunities for our three and four year old children. Was he going to propose the public education system have mandatory courses covering the care, enrichment and education of children? No. Was his plan to pay mothers a living wage to stay home and tutor their own children? No. Was he going to call for the government to provide enrichment books, games, and learning materials at a discounted price for parents? No. Sadly, the proposal was limited to taking children at an even younger age from their homes for mass produced learning and child care, rather than the individualized tutorial and nurturing environment of a real home.
Deflated, I sat back and realized that the best child care would still not be universally available to the toddlers of America. This newest governmental vision fell short of the gold-standard entitlement package the Lord has for His youngest creations. Read more
Little approaches the equal parts of awe and dread mingling in new parents’ souls when Baby comes to their arms for the first time.
No matter how eager or prepared parents are, even the best carry to the nursery baggage from their growing up experiences, limitations and gaps in wisdom, and deceptions about what is right when “right,” especially when “right” is a hash of what they want to believe, what they wish were true, what makes it easy for them to excuse their own behavior, and placate their own desires.
We can talk about some baggage. When we say someone is easily angered or quickly impatient, we have a mental picture of how the person behaves.
But those words address elements of the murky world beyond words, the realm of sense and impression, sub-conscious auras, the part of life we can neither express nor explain and, frankly, may not even recognize its influence.
This is the world in which all newborns are steeped, where no mental words explain their knowledge or sense about their world. Adults cannot consciously return to that world without worlds, but we can consider: What if none of my thinking was connected to language? What, or how, would I “know” anything? Read more
When is the best time to start preparing your child for apprentice training?
About 42 seconds after you realize a new baby is on the way!
This allows for a few seconds of delighted laughing and hugging before dedicating the new eternally destined human back to the Lord for safe keeping, wise upbringing, noble character, and spiritual values. Acknowledging the Lord’s ownership of “your” child, and realizing your task is to fit him or her for the Lord’s purposes is the first step in apprentice training. Another question:
What is the most important item to acquire to be prepared for a new baby’s arrival?
If you are living alone, or have no help from others in the household, only you can keep up routine cleaning and attend to the deep cleaning tasks. Stay professional by doing tasks with an analytical spirit. Look for ways to streamline. Experiment with a different way of doing the jobs. Pinpoint the interruptions or events that delay or set you off track.
If you still have organizational problems in certain rooms, now is the time to make them disappear and go away for good. If you conquered them earlier, fine, but if not, make an appointment with yourself to handle them. Get the storage equipment, bags, or shelving needed to corral (if not eliminate) the problem.
I have one question: What is harder than doing all this work yourself–even after designing such great routines?
Priority Stewardship 