I'm excited to introduce my very first column as a contributor for TheBlaze! The first part is below, then you can click the link on or below the picture for the rest. Parenting is a job we sort of “get,” regardless of our qualifications, knowledge, or experience, simply because of biological reality. No matter how much responsibility and experience we’ve had in our jobs or other aspects of our lives, I think when we first set eyes upon that tiny, fragile, amazing miraculous life that … [Read more...]
Free Range Kids
My father was the ultimate free range kid. He grew up in a Virginia coal mining town called Dante (if you’d like to know how to pronounce it, think less literary history and more along the lines of a word that rhymes with ‘ain’t’), a place nestled so deep in the Appalachian Mountains that you literally have to look straight up to see the sky. Like most of the men in that town and dozens more like it, his father and his father’s father were coal miners, and while his father worked he and his … [Read more...]
Footprints Worth Following
When it snows at our house the kids love to go outside and play. Inevitably, my wife or I have preceded them out the door for one reason or another – to shovel the driveway, get the mail, or just check out the beauty of God’s amazing creation. When we do, of course, we dot the previously pristine snowscape with giant, adult footprints. When the kids first come out to play, it’s fun to watch them take abnormally large footsteps, trying their very best to walk in the footprints we left. It’s a … [Read more...]
Five Things Kids Should See From Every Marriage
From the time our children leave their mother’s womb and take their very first breath, they need stuff from us. It starts with the most basic needs – sustenance, warmth, shelter – and, at least according to friends of ours with older children, apparently never really ends (although I’m hoping that isn’t true – when my wife and I eventually retire to the Caymans we aren’t taking ANY of them with us!). It all happens in stages, of course. They need basic sustenance for a while, then they need … [Read more...]
Moments that take my breath away
Being the parents of four small children, we often get advice from unexpected places. Sometimes that advice is welcome, other times not so much, but we (usually…) appreciate the sentiment nonetheless. Perhaps the most common word of advice we hear, always from parents who are older than us, is to cherish the moment, because it won’t last forever. Now I can’t speak for my more sentimental wife, but I will admit that when people said that to me in the early days of our parenthood I would just … [Read more...]