Winter is almost gone and Spring is near

Gosh, I am a quart low on blogging folks. Life certainly has been keeping us busier than I would like to admit. You know the drill, we all do it. We sleep, eat, interact with our families, go to work and spend way too much time with people we barely know. Heck, sometimes we spend more time with those folks than we do our own family members. Then we have two activities or more at church and extracurricular activities with the children and before you know it Monday turns into Sunday and you find yourself doing it all over again. Between life’s activities and the many distractions that we have pulling us here and there we fail to stop and appreciate life and it zooms right past us. It seems that the older you get the faster time flies. Is it because when we were younger we spent too much time having fun and smelling the coffee and other things and now as we have come into a fuller realization of what the meaning of life is we are working over time trying to make up for lost time?

My six month contract is almost half over and I think that my supervisor is going to have me hold over for a couple of extra months and provide them extra cover for some projects that are coming up during the summer. That will be nice because I like working there and I love the pay checks. One of the nice things about working there is that I am learning some new technology. Then again that is the nice thing about contracting vs. being an in house employee. When you are a contractor you find yourself working in all sorts of environments with different technology implemented in different ways. You are always on a learning curve with what you are doing. In the last three months I have learned something about GroupWise administration, Tivoli Storage Manager, Dell Open manage, VMWARE and Citrix. I am working in a very large data center environment with over 200 servers and network support equipment. That is an awesome environment to learn in each day.

Katy spent the weekend with her Happy Days ladies on the Isle of Palms and had a good time cropping and going on a boat ride to see some dolphins. I can not wait to see the pictures she is going to share with us. I am hopeful that sometime in the near future that the Renaissance men of Happy Days will be able to put something together for them to do. Why do the ladies always have all the fun anyway?

Katy has a couple of months to go and her first official year as a teacher will have been completed in Charleston County. They like her so much they asked her to come back next year. GO KATY GO!!!! I am so proud of how hard Katy has worked towards getting her certification last year and this year and applied herself and did a good job. Just this week Katy got some new eye glasses for the first time in several years. Now that we have medical insurance we were able to get Katy some badly needed glasses. Katy said that she can see better far off but still needs them to make some adjustments to the bifocal part of the glasses which allows her to see close up. Speaking of glasses I finally went and put mine on so I could see what I am babbling about. One of the things I HATE about wearing glasses is the constant cleaning you have to do. Oh well, that is the price you have to pay when you are growing older.

Friday afternoon just before I got off of work I got an emergency phone call from a friend of mine who wound up in the ER with an ugly stomach virus. Poor dear was so SICK… I helped my friend by doing whatever they needed done. That is what friends are for, right? My friend told me that they called another friend of theirs before they called me because they knew this other person was off from work and they told them that they could not come pick them up because what they had was very contagious and they did not want to expose themselves to it. OH MY GOSH…. I could NOT believe THAT. Common sense would tell you that you just need to take some simple precautions to make sure you don’t catch whatever it is that they have. Some of those precautions are as follows. Do not touch the person that is sick any more than you absolutely have to. If the sick person needs to sneeze or otherwise expel fluids of some sort they need to be mindful of the others that are trying to help them. Make sure that after you touch anything that the sick person has used that you wash that object with hot water and soap and then wash your hands thoroughly with hot water and soap also. If you follow some common sense guidelines you don’t have to worry about catching a virus from someone.
I believe that my friend will be much better come Monday morning and I am thankful for that. I had my church members pray for this person this morning as I had promised I would.

I am so glad my wife is back home tonight. Katy brings a semblance of sanity to our household. Katy is the glue that holds this family together. Katy is dependable and the loving connection between us parents and our children. If it were up to me I might wind up in prison because I would give in to the urge to hurt or maim my children at least once or twice per week. Yes, I am kidding about actually harming my children physically however I have to be honest and say that they do drive me to the edge of the precipice and give me the opportunity to fantasize about how fun it would be to go after them. Remember that I said Katy was here so that means that when I start getting a crazy look in my eyes she is there to stop me and remind me that it is still unlawful to hurt your offspring.

Oh yeah, back to the “basketball coach” analogy. Parents are the coach, the kids are the players and the game is LIFE. Our job as parents is to keep the kids playing the game as safely as possible by watching them and making sure they are playing by the rules and staying within bounds. The kid’s job is to try and break the boundaries as often as possible and to be rebellious about the rules. Why should they play the game of life (ball) our way when it is obvious we are out of touch with life altogether. How many of us thought that about our parents when we were their age? I remember thinking my parents were clueless about life. Once I got into my early twenties and I had had enough of being my own man and getting smacked around by the game of life I realized my parents were not idiots after all.

I think I am way overdue on my Prozac prescription folks. I think that I have decided that instead of trying to be a basketball coach with my teenager (soon to be teenagers) that it would be easier to just medicate myself and just do everything myself. You know, clean your room, do your chores, don’t sass us, be nice to your mother, be sure to feed the birds or they will die etc Like I said, it is just easier to get up and do it myself. Whatever that it is IT surely requires a lot of work. I guess that the laziness gene runs very strong in my children because I think that they must have gotten it from dear ole dad. I will be the first one to tell you that it is much easier to sit on my proverbial rear end and order the kids to do this and that. My parents did it and therefore I should do it too and it is right. Is that right or wrong? When does normal chores and being a gofer (go fer this and fer that) go from being chores to slave labor? I think that I tend to teeter on the child labor law abuser more often than I care to admit. I guess that every generation makes its fair share of mistakes with regards to raising the children. All we can hope is that we do a better job and that we break the chains of bondage with regards to the bad stuff and we relearn and change the bad things into good things. That of course requires a heart change and a desire to do something a different way which requires a lot of thought and a change of direction.

One other thing that change requires is a heart attitude of looking to our God for the help we need when we reach the end of our rope. God knows that I need HIM all the day long. I need more of Jesus now than ever before. You see, the older you get the more you realize just how much about life you just don’t know. It is equally hard on you if you did not have a godly mom or dad that was there to be an example or they are no longer there to go to for advice. Hey mom or dad this is what I am going through and this is how I am responding or how I am thinking about responding. When you do not have that safety valve you have to depend on one another as parents and look to your connection with God and your local church to find the right answers.

One of the things I have to overcome with my children is what most parents have to overcome. We tend to raise our children and react to our children like our parents did. That is our instant frame of reference for us. It is hardwired into us because of 18 years of experience. The kids to this and we immediately want to do whatever it is our parents did. In my case it was either a slap across the face or whatever body part was within range and/or a lecture that lasted for hours. Luckily for me and my children I have only raised my hand to them on a couple of instances in the last 20 years. I have been able to collect my wits about me and send them to their room, when I found myself wanting to react to them in anger. That is a GOD thing and nothing that I have done within myself by myself. I have spent some time listening to godly parents and teachers like James Dobson who became a new role model for me in parenting skills. Lots of prayer and watching other godly parents has helped as well.

My next door neighbor keeps reminding me those kids are supposed to be kids and it is our job and responsibility to be the parents that they need. Kids are going to act and behave like children and that is how they learn, by making mistakes and receiving correction and love to help guide them and mold them. Children are not an interruption of our day but rather should be the focus of our day. No, I am not saying that we should worship our children above and before God or our mates. However, when I am getting irritated with having to be the basketball coach of life I hear my neighbors words that one of my roles as a father is to do just that. I also have to say that while my neighbor is certainly not the perfect parent (what is that anyway??) in my eyes I have to say that they both love their kids a lot and do an admirable job with raising them. Ok, now that I said that their ears will be burning or they just fell out of their chair. LOL… I have been accused of being super critical with regards to my opinions and so they might think that I am super critical of their parenting skills. See, that is what you get for assuming folks. LOL…. All parents have their weaknesses and their strengths and all you can do is to look for your mate, church and help from God with regards to your weaknesses and do the absolute best that you can do. Before we know it our kids will be all grown up and gone making a life and families for themselves and then it will be too late.