Each week there is a celebration in our home. It begins early on Wednesday morning and includes singing, cheers, and some occasional dancing – it’s also included tears when one of the boys sleeps through the first phase. The celebration isn’t something my wife or I started; it began with one of our youngest son’s fascinations.

Each Wednesday morning, we hear the tell-tale screech and both the boys bolt out of bed and rush to the window to begin the celebration for a much needed, yet seldom recognized group of men, the “garb men” – known to you and me as garbage men.

My youngest son, Alex, loves big trucks and a garbage truck certainly qualifies. On trash day, they rush to the window for each wave (refuse, plastic & glass, and paper) of collection, scream “garb men”, and watch in fascination. Some days they simply return to what they were doing when the truck moves on, but on other days they run around singing praise to the garbage men – it’s quite a spectacle.

It may seem funny, but this celebration is one of the things that concerned me about moving. I accepted a new position in a different part of the country and one of the things I’ve been wondering is – will garbage day be too early or too late in the day for the celebration? We’re staying with friends for now and the kids were able to see the new garbage men – it wasn’t the same celebration, but the men were appreciated none the less.

There are a lot of things that we take for granted – jobs that people do that are necessary for our society to function, but jobs that I often overlook; things I take for granted. I realize that we can’t have a party every day for all the people that make our lives what they are, but my sons are certainly showing me that we can take the time to appreciate them more often.

Hurray for all of our civil servants and community helpers.

Generally when I write at DadBlogger I’ve tried to give some insight to perspective fathers or reminder to current fathers. I’ve also taken the opportunity to share some of God’s truths on parenting and marriage; what I haven’t done much of is simply bragging about my children.

Sometimes I think that I’m too hard on my two boys and other times I think that I am spoiling them beyond repair. I wonder each time I punish them if I’m doing it the right way or am I just angry. I wonder each time I give in if I’m preparing them to be the annoying person that thinks they should always get their way. Despite all this wondering, other people have told me that we have very well behaved children and their right, but I’m not sure how much of it has to do with me and my wife.

While I want my kids to have good manners, I’m not sure I’m the perfect model and I certainly don’t go over the top in trying to make everything about saying please and thank you; yet, my 21 month old son will say “welcome” every time you say thank you, and “Thank you” every time you give him what he’s asked for – it’s amazing. He’s also very consistent about saying “mee me” (excuse me) when he needs to get by. When someone doesn’t understand or doesn’t hear, he says it louder.

As for my 5 year old son, I was blown away earlier this week when he handed me what I thought was another drawing. It was a thank you note for making him a paper airplane; simply amazing.

It’s not always blissful at our house, there are fights and fits and crying; they are normal children. But it’s unusual that anyone is in any real trouble. It really makes me want to believe that it all because I’m a good Dad and we’re simply great parents, but I know the truth is that God has really blessed us. Our children are just right for us, and as parents, we’re just right for them.

Children were designed to meet expectations. If you set them low, they’ll meet them and if you set them high, they’ll do whatever they can to meet them. Part of our goal as parents should be to set the bar high and then be encouragers – praising them when they reach the goal and catching them when they fall so they can get back up again.

A while back I heard a neat talk about the separation in cultures. It pertained to the way church was done and it was so apparent to me – and I considered myself in the tech savvy group, not BC. The talk had to do with those who were born BC and those that were born later. Not “Before Christ” but “Before Computers”.

It made since to me. There were, and still are people that I talk to all the time that just don’t get it. Computers and technology freak them out. To me, they seem to refuse to learn – and I don’t understand it.

I’m good with computers; I grew up with them, programmed them, built them, and for a time was paid well to fix them. Computers have been and still are a hobby. I wasn’t born before the first computers, but I am certainly “Before PCs.” I was sure that I was not BC; my son is showing me otherwise.

For the last year, he’s had his own computer. We started with toddler programs on our laptops and eventually moved to preschool programs on desktop of his own. He’s even started school on the computer. We’ve been using Jump Start World – Kindergarten, and he’s more than half way finished. (If you’re looking for Kindergarten materials – or even something for your kids to do on the computer – check our Jump Start World.) The program gives him various learning activities that he needs to master before moving on to the next level…and all I hear on some days is, “I’m mastered it!” over and over again.

It’s not just that program either. He has no problems getting to sites that he enjoys, pulling up other programs, or pretty much doing whatever he wishes. Nor is it just computers.

I received a Wii for Christmas. He’s only four so strategy skills haven’t developed, but he’s almost better than me in tennis and can hold his own in boxing and bowling – and there’s other games that he has very little problems playing.

The kicker, that really showed me that he’s going to be leaps ahead of me soon, was at the Apple story Friday night. I asked him if he wanted to see the iPhone and he was delighted to be able to play with one. In seconds of handing him the phone he was looking at photos (without anyone showing him how) and soon after was taking pictures.

I don’t have long left before he’s considering me BC so I’m going to have to make sure I help him with technology now - while I still can.

* After writing this, I saw a video for Microsoft Surface - essentially a smart table....I’m simply amazed at what our children will be able to do. And not just do, for them, it will be like these things have always existed.

One of the saddest statistics that I have read was that most people do not read another book after they have graduated from High school, and the majority of college graduates do not read another non-fiction book. I can hardly believe that most people will go their whole lives without reading another book. At first, I thought, “That can’t be true.”
Then I started to ask people about their reading habits. Most people I talked to hadn’t read. I did research to see if I could find better numbers only to find out that almost 70% of the US populations (where one-third of all books are sold) have never been inside a book store.
This is so foreign to our family. I challenge myself to reading 10 books a year, I think my wife reads that many at a time, my older son is deeply, deeply in love with books, and even my youngest (18 months) has caught the book love bug.

Kevin, my 4 year old, has always been fond of books. He has at least one story each night, and then takes books with him to bed. (See pictures) A library visit means that we’ll be brining home at least 20 books and that doesn’t even count mom & dad’s books. This love of books and reading has its blessings, but it also comes with a cost.

The biggest blessing is that at 4, he’s already starting to read. One of the computer programs we have says he knows 11 words, but we know it’s more…he knows all 3 letter words that end in an, at, ag, ad and is moving to the ig words and beyond. He’s able to chart his reading progress on a poster that we have in our dining room; after all, reading is important enough to let everyone know that he can do it. Another blessing is language development - he’s using bigger words more often, “apparently.”

An obvious drawback to Kevin’s love of books is cost and storage. We rarely pass on book fairs and books are a common reward – which means we need a place to put them all. As he grows out of them, he can pass them on to his little brother, but there’s still a ton of books. (I wonder how accurate it is that the average per person spending on books was only $7.18 per month in 2001.)

The subtle cost is cleaning up books - his little brother enjoys taking all the Seuss and Little Golden books off the shelf and can’t put them back. Then, there are events like last night. I heard a noise in his room and when I went to check, he was jumping into bed and said, “I was just getting some books.” Fully half of the bottom bookshelf was on his bed.

I thought that the clean up, which I am glad to do, was the only cost of being in love with books, but another one popped up during his school work. One of the computer games that helps him learn math uses a book, with pages missing. The object is to collect the missing pages before the vacuum or the bug destroys the book. Seems like a simple game, but for him it’s distressing. He say that it’s “very frustrating” because he doesn’t want the book to get destroyed.

All in all, I’m happy to put up with the minor problems. Book buying households make, on average, more than $6000 more than non-book buying households. But it’s not just about the money. I’m happy that he’s an avid book lover because I know his life will be better because of it.

So why are you still reading this? Go read a book to your child.

Not to long ago I had a talk with my 4 year old son. I can’t remember how it started, but I’ll always remember the wisdom that was put forth.

For some reason we were talking about punishment. I asked him if he thought that I should not punish him anymore; his answer surprised me. I fully expected that he would agree that he should not be punished, but instead he said he, “When I do bad things, daddy should punish me.”

There are times when you realize, after the fact, that the silly conversation you were having had turned into something serious. This wasn’t one of those times, I knew right away that this was something to explore.

“You want to be punished when you do bad things?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like being punished?”

“No.”

“Then why do you want to be punished?”

“So when I grow up I can know how to be a good daddy.”

There’s a verse in the Bible that talks about father’s not provoking their children – one translation puts it this way: Father’s don’t discipline your children in such a way that you make them angry. I think about this every time I need to punish my children; I want to make sure that I am correcting their behavior, not taking out my frustration.

This conversation really drove that home. Now I understand how he sees the punishment that I am dolling out – not just as correction, but so that he can be more like me.

I think that’s how we need to see God’s correction too…