My parents visited this weekend. It’s always wonderful to see them. I feel like we don’t entertain them enough, not having a television in the traditional sense and the fact that most of our weekends are spent running little errands and tending to the kids’ needs. But they’re always the first to assert they have a good time at our home. They play with Luke and hold and coo at Penelope and just spend time, something we’re always eager for. We haven’t visited their house back in the Chapel Hill since Mother’s Day, what with the pregnancy and Pen’s newness and aversion to the carseat. But since she’s a little older and we’ve cracked the carseat conundrum, we’re hopeful we’ll be able to spend a couple of days in CH soon.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to know how to be the spiritual leader in the family. I know my dad had a hard time with it. I think just like so many other things, the primary way truths and habits are communicated is through example. To take just one aspect of it, I learned that having morning devotions, or just daily devotions at any time is important not necessarily because my dad told me explicitly, but because I remember walking downstairs in the early morning on more than one occasion and seeing my dad hunched over a Bible at the kitchen table. That scene remains very immediate in my mind when I think about leading and nurturing my family in such ways.<\/p>\n
Saturday night Diane and I were discussing Luke, as we often do, and his current, growing ability to communicate. At the moment he’s all about facts. Anything that comes out of his mouth is likely to be a statement about a planet, a state, a country, the fact that mommy doesn’t like tomatoes, or that daddy’s favorite skyscraper is the CN Tower, and so on. The idea of expressing a desire like hunger or thirst or the need to use the restroom or even simple emotions like happiness or sadness is completely foreign to him (even when asked). It’s slightly counterintuitive given how directly motivated kids his age are by physical desire; I would think one of the first things he would learn to tell us is that he wants more food, or that he’s happy, etc. But no, it’s just facts. It’s more frustrating for Diane than me, not only because she spends more time with him in a given week than I do, but because emotional communication is so intrinsic to her nature. Granted, boys and men are tough nuts to crack emotionally anyway; it’s often difficult for us to figure out what we ourselves<\/i> are feeling, let alone communicate it, but I think at least most basic physical desires should be fairly easy to express. He’s 3 and a half, and we’re certainly not expecting Demosthenes-like levels of oratory, but goodness knows it would certainly make toilet training easier if he would learn (or decide) to communicate certain desires, or even the presence of certain, um, substances after the fact. Ah, parenthood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My parents visited this weekend. It’s always wonderful to see them. I feel like we don’t entertain them enough, not having a television in the traditional sense and the fact that most of our weekends are spent running little errands and tending to the kids’ needs. But they’re always the first to assert they have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}