Sacred Parenting

This was a great read. The main thrust is laid out in the first chapter, that the goal of Godly parenting is to raise Godly parents.

Yep, you read that correctly. Just as marriage is more about making us holy than it is making us happy, parenting is the same way. God uses the reality of kids in our lives to make us holy.

Our culture tells us something quite different. It tells us that having kids and getting married is the key to happiness, or at least a piece of the happiness puzzle. The Bible tells us that the key to everlasting joy is found in the person and beauty of Jesus. God uses our kids to raise and sanctify (grow) us into the kind of people he wants us to be.

The rest of the book then talks about the reality that true joy is found in Christ and different aspects of parenting that can help us find our joy in him. This is a great read. I've not read many (perhaps not any?) other parenting books, but I'll guess this would be my favorite regardless. So many parenting books are to-do lists that only burden us with guilt at not being the perfect parents. This book is not like that and that puts it at the top of the list for me.

All over

MLK day of service is tomorrow. Should be fun. I'm hoping to reconnect with Ray at the Habitat restore. I blogged about him a little while ago.

Big week for me and my guys. I'm planning on hitting the dorms hard and sharing boldly and repeatedly. Pray Jesus would give us the words to say.

We're sitting Noah on his potty. Trying to get him used to it with his clothes on before we start getting more intense. I'm scared.

We're also trying to draw a line in the sand about his meals. No more catering to his wims, we'd like for him to actually eat what we offer!

I made a few New Year's resolutoins and actually am holding to them for the most part. Now if we could just stop eating out...

Snow!

We've had some snow the past few days so we decided to have some fun with it. Noah gets pretty upset when we try to bundle him up in his snow suit, but after a few minutes of wrestling and tears, we're ready to go out. Once we get outside, he's totally content, even if he just stands there. Melissa's mom found a sled for us so he enjoys being pulled around in that. Unfortunately I have a tendency to kick some snow in his face on occassion, but he handles it well. He's such a cool little dude.

Speaking of cool little dudes, he has at least 1 of his molars in, 1 half in and 2 working their way in and he's been a trooper. Sometimes he gets extra cranky, but for the most part, he handles it like a champ. He apparently has a pretty high pain tolerance or something. We're ok with that.

My mom got us a potty for him for Christmas, so we've been having him sit on that every once in a while. Ideally he'd be potty trained before the baby comes so we're going to be working on that. No real training yet, though. Just sitting on it to get comfortable with his throne.