This is Blaire, captured via iPhone throwing her first drama queen tantrum. She was full of angst about not getting to eat the wormy pear she snagged outside. The good news is that Blaire has a Daddy who loves her, so she won’t be doing much more of this. Limited time release and all that. Of course she will be doing a great many more things for years to come, but sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof!
Many of us come from backgrounds of rigid discipline and high expectations. Others of us may not have ever experienced house rule, and have no idea how to set them up for our children. It is easy for us to be in one ditch or the other – either all law and no grace, or all “grace” and no law. But the point is really to be somewhere in the middle. How do we do this?
Continue reading ‘Ungraceful Parenting’
before you believe…billboards.
Nate and I drove by this today. No idea who did it but that billboard’s been asking for something for a while.
So I had a special request from someone that I write a little something about raising older daughters. “Older” in this case means something more along the lines of upper elementary age . . . I don’t yet have any teenage girls. (But when I do I’ll have them in spades . . . my girls will be 13,14, and 15 all at the same time!)
“Daughters” is kind of a big topic actually, and a whole lot of things spring to mind. I’m not even going to try to say everything all at once – I thought maybe I should pick away at it and just mention a couple of things right now.
The first thing I thought of is “foolishness.” This is something that we’ve worked on from the time our girls were very small – it’s not only relevant to older girls. However, I’ve been very grateful that we have been working on it for years . . . because we’re now hitting the age where this category actually matters. Basically, you reap what you sow. You harvest what you plant and tend. If you don’t want a harvest of foolishness when your daughter is grown, don’t tolerate foolishness when it’s small. Picture a garden. That enormous stink-weed there amongst the lettuce didn’t just appear there overnight. It started out as a seedling, and you let it grow for months and months. Not only did you neglect to pull it up, you probably watered it diligently every day. If you don’t want the big stink-weed, learn to recognize the little baby stink-weeds and get rid of them as they appear. Hint: they don’t look nearly so dire when they’re smaller. They might possibly even be cute. But they’re much, much easier to pull up when they’re small and cute. Continue reading ‘Girls, girls, girls’
For any of you ministers’ wives out there who have recently joined us, I send out an email newsletter from time to time called “The Minister’s Wife.” If you would like me to add you to the mailing list, just leave a comment here. (You don’t have to leave your email address, as it is included with your comment.) My mailing list is around 300 wives from a many denominations and a few continents. So if your husband is a minister, feel invited!
The weather is changing, revealing that there are not any clothes for the kids. For reals. None. Turns out kids grow three or four inches of leg over the summer. The clothes that we have been wearing have no life left. They should all simply be destroyed, and we should start over. We are trying. I ran to Old Navy on the first cold day and discovered that they have no children’s clothes right now. Ack. So I ended up grabbing a bunch of cheap t-shirts at WalMart for the girls and did an assortment of appliqués on them. I’m hoping these buy us a little time!
I also finished knitting a little sweater for my niece Zoe, a marvelous little person whom we just got to meet this weekend. She looks quite nice in it, although it is hard to tell what she thinks of it!
“To the traveler’s eyes, the motel is dead and useless, a roadside tragedy, like the remains of some unfortunate animal in a ditch – glimpsed, mourned, and forgotten before the next bend in the road. But to the lean boy with the dark skin and the black hair struggling in the thick brush behind the pool, the motel is alive, and it is home.”
I know I am biased. I just am. Can’t help it. When your brother writes a great book, people just expect you to like it. And I do. But I like it more than that. I like it so much that I am willing to tell you all that you absolutely need this book. Get it! Don’t live another minute without it!
The thing that I love about Nate’s books (all of them) is his sense of place. He writes stories that are mysterious, exciting, and provoking, but they all occur here. In our very own backyards. In our very own country. With our very own people.
This isn’t an accident. Continue reading ‘Get in to Ashtown’
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