parenting

As I work on raising happy children, one of the things I keep doing is looking at myself. What makes me happy? What qualities or skill sets have I developed that help me most? And I think one of the biggest is the ability to be self-confident. Specifically, the ability to be able to ignore what other people think I should be doing (or wearing or thinking or saying) to instead have confidence that what I am doing is good for me. (There’s the flip side of this, of course, which is dangerous: being unwilling to acknowledge that what I’m

Since the beginning of the year, Denisa and I have been attending a weekly parenting class offered by our church. (Well, most weeks. Some weeks it was just me, some weeks it was just her, and we had to miss entirely once or twice, because life.) It’s been an interesting experience, as much of the learning was done through sharing different experiences between the parents who were in the class. My biggest takeaway was that each family is very different, and the things that work for one household won’t necessarily work for another. This is frustrating in some ways, because

I let you all know last week that I’d switched up how we’re running chores in my household. It was a drawn out process, filled with family debate and short tempers at time, but in the end, the whole family went along with it. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it was worth a shot. Nearing the end of the second week of the new system, I decided to do a walk through of the house to assess how it was going. And lo and behold, each and every room looked good. Not spotless, and not perfectly tidy,