Update, May 6: The original intent of this article was to show how I turned an uncomfortable situation into a salutary habit. In the first edition of this post, explicit references made some readers uncomfortable and were not necessary to the point, so those references have been removed.
There is a Lutheran blog called Priestmanship [...]
Listening to Rev. Wilken’s monologue on vocation reminded me of a recent conversation with the older daughter.
We were in the kitchen unpacking from the Cleveland trip: Mom, myself, and the older daughter. I had asked her to do something simple, taking something upstairs. She got mad and started crying, then angrily said, “You always give [...]
I was able to go home Friday without delay this time, so the family had the opportunity to go to church Sunday morning. Wouldn’t you know it, it was Matins.
The kids were a little confused because Pastor Gau didn’t chant his parts, but the congregation was left to sing all of their parts. I [...]
It didn’t take long, just over five years from the girls’ birth, during the last duration I was home.
I don’t remember the question, somewhere along the lines of wear your socks or help me clean up the living room, perhaps, but the answer was:
“Because I don’t tell you to do bad things. I ask you [...]
The blog of the Concordian Sisters of Perpetual Parturition ponders on the ethics of tattling:
Is there some inherent fault with tattling such that the tattler should get in trouble for having tattled? Or, given that I want to know if someone is doing something they shouldn’t, should tattling be encouraged?
We discourage tattling with the older [...]
Because I will be out of town when the 12 days of Christmas expire, we have put our Christmas decorations away, including our crèche with the Baby in the manger.
The older daughter, days away from five years old, says, “Do we get to put out the Easter decorations?”
I said, well, we have seven [...]
The New Year brings snow, leftover finger foods, a lot of trash on the curb tomorrow, and the unfortunate task of duplicating all my file folders so I can file stuff.
It won’t take resolutions for me to avoid some of the things that we did this previous year. One shouldn’t wait until the secular day [...]
As the daughters were getting ready for their bath this evening, the older one said a phrase we classify as bad language. She was specifically told by Mom never to say that phrase again, and that she would get her mouth washed out with soap.
During bath time, however, the phrase came out again. I [...]
