Category Archives: Parenting

Gratitude and Patience

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A day late, I know. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. But today I am reflecting on what I am thankful for, and trying to remember this (actually currently on a minute by minute basis). Recently my prayers have included asking for help in being patient with my children. Oh it is SO easy to be patient with babies, and toddlers. Not quite as much with growing children with strong personalities and minds of their own (can we say a 7 year old boy with an abundance of energy and 2 sisters he delights in teasing??).

I remember though, that I am so grateful for these beautiful wonderful children and one day, yes, one day, this overly energetic son and my budding pre-teen daughter (cringe), independent 3 year old and baby coming and any more who will come to us, will be all grown up and I won’t have my babies to cuddle and children to protect and nurture. That will be their job with their children. So learning to enjoy and revel in this time is vitally important. So yes, I am learning patience. At least I hope so.

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Love One Another, As I Have Loved You

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My personal quest has been, recently, to study and understand the principle of charity better. Even more so, to understand the true nature of love, as the Saviour would have us love. So, I have been studying the scriptures, thinking about it, thinking about the nature of Jesus Christ, reading other publications, such as The Peacegiver: How Christ heals our hearts and homes and The Anatomy of Peace (which I am currently in the middle of reading).

Just yesterday I had an epiphany.

I asked myself the following question, or rather, the following question came to my mind; Why do I love Jesus Christ? (or anyone I love, for that matter). Why do I feel humble when thinking of Him, why do I get an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love when I think about Him? Is it because of anything I have done? Is it because I feel I deserve or should be loved by Him? No.

And why do I have a desire to be better and to do what He wants me to do? Why do I strive (with limited success) to be like Him? Why do I want to be like Him?

It is because He loves me. And I don’t just think this, it is something I know and feel and am aware of on a basic level. His love for me is apparent when I feel the spirit, when I think of His life, how He lived and behaved towards people He came in contact with. This is independent of His teachings to obey the commandments. His love for me is unconditional. Remember, this is independent of His teachings to be obedient and follow the commandments. Loving me does not mean He expects less of me or will let me off the hook.

So all these things I feel and want to be are inspired by His love for me. Not for anything in myself or that I have created. This is the love that He wants us to have for others. For our husbands and wives, our parents, our children, our friends, our other family members, our acquaintances, those we have conflict with, those who are not like us, those who offend us, those who hurt us, those we have no reason to like, those who do things that annoy us. Everyone. He wants us to actually have this love so that they feel this love and are saved by it.

I understand what this love is. It isn’t the doing, it is the state of heart and mind, of truly loving, so that in our demeanor, attitude and behaviour towards others, we radiate this love. This is why people flocked to Him, why children surrounded Him. They knew His love was genuine and constant, they basked in it and wanted it. When He came to the Americas, this is why the multitude didn’t want Him to leave. This is the Spirit which cannot help but be present in the face of such love. It is a love that grows and needs no effort, because it is. It is something that is possible to attain through a lifetime of learning and growth. He has this love for all. We can at least, have this love for those around us.

This is a love I can develop over time, independent of my expectations of others, that I can come to with His help. But this is the true concept of the love of Jesus Christ.

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Cub Scouts

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My eight year old son just started cub scouts this fall.?Ǭ He’s pretty stoked and has fun going.

As a parent, I’m not impressed with what our ward offers as far as the cub scout program goes.?Ǭ For example, this week, their activity was “Putting away the chairs in the gym from general conference”.?Ǭ Now, if that was ever the lamest cop-out of an activity, I don’t know what is!?Ǭ I believe they passed it off as a “Service Activity”.

?ǬThis got my wife and I talking.?Ǭ My nephews are also in cub scouts.?Ǭ They aren’t members of the church, so they go to a community group.?Ǭ I believe they have 50+ kids going to this community cub scout group.?Ǭ There are quite a few parent volunteers who help out.?Ǭ They are always working on badges, skills, getting ready for camps, fund-raisers, etc… all the things I remember doing when I was eight years old and in cub scouts.

Is the difference that we’ve made cub scouts a part of the church??Ǭ Is it because it’s a calling that it only gets done half-ass?

?ǬWe’re considering the idea of taking our son out of the ward sponsored cub scout program and put him in the community one.

I feel bad for our local leadership.?Ǭ I’m going to assume that they are trying to make the church experience the best it can be.?Ǭ But from my perspective, it is seriously lacking.?Ǭ When you have a program being so poorly run, how do you turn that around??Ǭ How do you create an environment where people actually want to come to church and socialize and participate??Ǭ How do you combat the apathy??Ǭ Or perhaps we should strip out all of the unessential programs and leave it to community groups to do what they do best?

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Stay-at-Home Mums

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I was having a discussion earlier this week with someone else who works at the university. Somehow the discussion turned to our children and she asked if we put them in childcare.

Has our society arrived at the point where it is assumed that mothers work away from home? Is it rare now to see stay-at-home mums?

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Breastfeeding in public

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I cam across an article in Babytalk magazine?Ǩyes, the same one that has much of the United States in an uproar, or so the media would have us believe?Ǩand i found a couple of items interesting. I thought I’d post them here.

A [USA] survey . . . published in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that 57 percent of those polled said that women should not have a right to breastfeed in public.

Only 10 percent of mothers who work full-time [still breastfeed] their baby at 6 months, according to a 2005 CDC report.

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association’s survey found that only 47 percent of [employers] favored longer maternity leaves, and only 43 percent supported giving women a private room to pump in at work.

A mom should breastfeed her baby for at least the first year of life, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.. . . In 2004 . . . about 70 percent of U.S. mothers reported that they had tried breastfeeding, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s up from 55 percent in 1993. . . . At 6 months, only 36 percent were still nursing. At 12 months, the number dips to 17 percent

Oh, and thanks to fMh for posting the link.

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OT Poop Chronicles I

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You know, just for the record, Lisa’s not the only one who has poop chronicles.

My 5-year-old son, my 10-month-old daughter, and I were waiting at the YMCA for my other daughter and my wife to finish getting the daughter changed from swimming lessons.

Our son said to me, “I’ll be right back.” and I watch him walk down the hall and turn into the male washroom. After three minutes, I thought to myself, “why is that boy taking so long”, so I went in to check on him, baby in my arms.

I asked him if he was alright and he unlatched the stall door and said he needed my help. I didn’t think much of it because he still hasn’t quite mastered the art of wiping yet. So while in the middle of wiping him, he says to me, “Papa? Can you wipe out my underwear too?”

Sure enough, he hadn’t quite made it to the toilet?Ǩdespite the deposit sitting in the toilet.

So here I was sitting in a bathroom stall with a baby in my one arm trying to think of how I was going to deal with his dirty?Ǩand quite wet might I add?Ǩunderwear and shorts. Then it hit me.

I went back to the waiting area and came back his backpack. Luckily he brought a plastic bag to hold his wet swimming suit and towel and, for some odd reason, had packed another set of shorts.

I put the baby on the floor, swished his underwear a few times in the toilet bowl to clean it out (flushing between swishes of course), put his shorts and slopping wet underwear in the same plastic bag, wiped off his feet, legs and the wall, and put new shorts on him. All this while moving my baby daughter away from the toilet twice and bringing her back from crawling under the stall door three times.

Then we both washed our hands. I washed mine twice.

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My first birds-bees talk

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I gave my first birds and the bees talk tonight. I was worried about it. Well, actually, I wasn’t really worried about what I would say, or how I would say it, or even the fact I would have to say anything. I was worried that our 7.5-year-old daughter was never going to ask a question that would lead into the talk, and we’d have to sit her down one day and just tell her out of the blue. I really wanted it to be a result of a question she had. And that’s how it turned out.

We have been wanting to tell her for quite awhile, but wanted to wait until she asked more specific questions than “where do babies come from”. While we were having father’s interview tonight (we do them on Fast Sundays), I asked her to get me our How Are Babies Made book. I wanted to give her another chance to ask a question.

I decided I would go through the book?Ǩit was written for young children, and has a lot of pictures and language designed for children?Ǩand after each page would ask her if she had any questions.

The first page was pretty uneventful. It pretty much discussed how babies come in different sizes and colours. Her question was, “How big are babies when they are born”. “All different sizes, but usually between six and ten pounds.

The second page talked about the egg and the sperm and how some sperm create girls and some sperm create boys. One of the things it discusses is that the sperm is in the man’s body and the egg in the woman’s body. Her question was, “How does the sperm get from the man’s body to the woman’s body”. This was my chance! “The man puts his penis inside the woman’s vagina and the sperm travels from the penis, through the vagina and into the uterus where it meets the egg”.

Before we finished the rest of the book, we took advantage of the opportunity to also discuss chastity, including fidelity. We also discussed the importance of being born into a family with parents who are married.

Anyhow, I am glad that is over. I was beginning to think we were either going to have a ten-year-old girl who would never ask more specific questions or that we’d have to sit her down and bring it up out of the blue.

Glad that’s not the case.

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Divorce Immunity

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I was listening to a podcast this morning about a family who experienced so much happiness together, and for certain reasons that are irrelevant to this post, the parents eventually got divorced. The parents continued having a very amicable relationship, but I was still saddened by the divorce. I was saddened because of why they divorced, just that they did, and it made me think about how unbearable it would be for me right now if Mary approached me and wanted a divorce. A divorce is unfathomable to me giving the state of our marriage currently.

But I was left wondering something. Do couples who divorce after 25 or 30 or 50 years feel the same way at 11 years of marriage as I do now? When they had been married for 11 years, was their married life blissful and divorce unfathomable? Or has the reality of eventual divorce already entered into their marriage by that point? Can I be realistic that if my marriage is as strong as it is now at 11 years, that it will always be immune to divorce?

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