Family First

Family is always first!  So that’s where I’ll start.

I’ve been married to my college sweetheart for about 25 years and we have an amazing family.  We have 4 wonderful kids ranging in age from 12 to 21.  Our journey has included loss, the addition of biological kids along with navigating a lengthy, and somewhat painful, adoption process.  Our life has had it’s ups and downs as most families do, but at the center, keeping it all together, is God.  Without him, we would be in a hopeless mess with no idea how to deal with life.  He provides everything we need, and a whole lot more!

Kids are great teachers.  Teachers, you ask?  Yes, I think we grow as parents because kids MAKE us learn and stretch us to be better people.  We have learned a lot about our kids and ourselves over the years.  We’ll never stop learning how to be better at parenting, because as soon as we think we’re done parenting our own kids, then along come grandkids… hopefully!  And we’ll be parenting them too, in a way. 

How do you become a better parent unless you search yourself?  How do you parent?  Why do you parent the way you do?  Is it the way you were parented?  Is it the opposite of how your parents raised you because you said you wanted to do it totally different?  Our journey as parents raising biological, as well as an adopted child from a “hard place,” has made us ask ourselves these tough questions.  In order to understand why you parent the way you do, you have to ask if the results you’re seeing are what you really want.  Are we close to our kids?  Do our kids trust us?  Do they come to us with hard things?  Or do they seek peers or seclusion from us instead?  Our goal is to raise loving, caring, empathetic, God following kids, who love to be around us as a family.  Life doesn’t always look like this… but we’re trying.

So this is the beginning of my journey… won’t you join me?