Some of my favorite works of art are Julian Beever's sidewalk illusions. If you haven't seen them they are truly amazing! He employs a technique called trompe l'oeil which is French for deceive the eye. He creates images that, when viewed from the correct angle, are optical illusions that appear to be three dimensional. It [...]
Category: Parenting
Who Has The Greater Responsibility?
One of the biggest struggles I've had as a parent is a pretty common one. And that is requiring better behavior from my children than I require from other adults or even myself. One of the ways I usually justify the higher standard for my kids is that I am teaching them and training them [...]
Are You Stuck on Friday?
Today is Good Friday and all over the world Christians will gather to commemorate the death of Jesus Christ. Churches will be full of the faithful and the marginal (outside of Mother’s Day and Christmas Eve, Easter is the most attended church service) all participating in one of the most somber services on the calendar. [...]
You’ve Got Perceptions, I’ve Got Reality
One of the most helpful things ever shared with me is the idea that we spend as much time managing perceptions as we do dealing with reality. That rings true in almost every avenue of life and perhaps none more so than with our kids, especially as it relates to their self-worth and self-image. Some [...]
5 Keys to Better Relationships
I want better relationships, don't you? And I don't just mean with my kids, I mean with everyone. I feel like I spend more time thinking, writing, and talking about improving the relationships I have than I actually spend changing the them. I need to remember that doing this might be easier than most of [...]
Labels Are For Things Not People
We all like to label things. If it doesn't have a label, then it doesn't make any sense to us. We even have label makers so that we can label our things. Apparently the names they were assigned by their makers don’t really work for us. We have to give them names that fit our [...]
Band-Aids Heal More Than You Can See
Giving and receiving love may seem like an easy thing, but for many adopted and foster kids this is hard. They have given love to people only to have those people disappear from their life or not return their love. They have received love only to be moved to a new home, or the "love" [...]
You Have to Stay Connected in the Chaos
We are usually a pretty busy family, but February 2014 stretched us in ways we hadn't experienced before. It almost did us in. In addition to all of the usual things we do (you know food, laundry, school, etc) we had to deal with games and rescheduled games, cancellations, and late starts because of snow, ice, and temperatures [...]
Do You Want to Connect With Your Kids? Try Apologizing to Them
The Bible says the children are a blessing from the Lord. That’s a big, scary statement and as their parents we have the responsibility to raise them well. Let’s look at parenting from 10,000 feet. There are essentially two very broad but different approaches to parenting: Do as I say Do as I do In [...]
Great and Other Expectations [Re-post]
One of the greatest sources of conflict for any of us is unmet expectations. So many of the low moments in my life are when people didn't behave the way I thought they should or hoped they would. At the same time there are an equal amount (if not more) of moments where others are [...]