Rookie moms and dads often struggle with their new role as parents. Will I ever be good enough? Am I up to the challenge? How can I possibly withstand the immeasurable weight that is the blind confidence of an innocent, little child? We see other mothers and fathers, perhaps our own, and wonder how we’ll [...]
Being a father is a radical responsibility. One that’s been neutered of its uniqueness and weight and turned into just another equal participant in the human economy. Well, we may have produced an economy of hard working men (and women), but we’ve also enabled a generation of slacker dads. Even the “good dads” are slackers. [...]
My wife and I play a game with our two year old son. It involves catching a fish. You never know if it’s gonna be a little, tiny fish – or a great, big whale of a fish. You can play this game on the bed, on the floor, pretty much anywhere. To begin, you [...]
Short on money this year for all those Christmas presents you need to buy? Good news: You don’t need it and you can still give the best Christmas gift ever. We spend over $450 Billion on Christmas gifts each year. Buying people gifts has become a matter of formality with less and less meaning. This [...]
“You’ll lose your looks having kids. But you’ll lose your looks anyway. So you may as well do it having children and then they can remind you of how good looking you once were.” – Janet Smith Life is way too short to spend it worrying about your looks so much anyway. Gee whiz. And [...]
Some good advice to pass along to any teens you know. But kids, do be patient with your stupid parents, they tend to get astonishingly smarter as you grow older.
Marriage serves two primary purposes. It is for both “the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring” [CCC 1601]. Yet, when we celebrate our wedding (marriage) anniversaries, we normally emphasize one of those things more than the other by turning it into a night or weekend away from the kids. In [...]
[photo source] “Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.” And actually, I’ve realized now that “one day” comes a lot sooner than you expect. In fact, kids understand the language of “example” far sooner than the language of “advice.” My toddler has been mimicking what [...]
About 8 months ago our beautiful daughter, Katherine, was born. That’s when we also found out about her Down Syndrome. And in the midst of wrestling with what that meant – for her life and for our family – I realized a very important lesson. A week or two later I was walking into the [...]
“When we find ourselves grousing about having so little time for ourselves, for being asked to do so much, let’s try to remind ourselves that that’s the way it’s supposed to be. God gave us our families to serve. We are being asked to give everything for our families. Indeed, we are being called to [...]
Here’s a little poem I wrote as a hypothetical future elegy for Marriage. It’s partially modeled after Niemöller’s famous “First they came…” statement. And it’s to point out that our culture has already been “redefining” marriage in numerous ways for a long time now. — First, they said it was no longer ’til death, and [...]
