Dad Advice posted - from Home Movies to Moving Out

We have shot home movies of our kids for years. And for years we haven't been watching them.

You know how it is. Your kids are small, growing up, and you're busy with basketball games and PTA meetings and scouting and running errands and doctor appointments and playing with the dog and every now and then if you do get a little free time you discover that the way you'd really like to spend it is to sleep! But there is definitely no time for watching old videos of your kids. Plus, who likes to see themselves in those things? No one, that's who. My voice sounds weird! I look fat! Is my bald spot REALLY that big? The camera must be lying.

But put those videos away for ten or twenty years, and they take on a new, almost magical quality. Now I know why we took them. So they could make us humble. So they could inspire us. So they could remind us of how small our problems are today, how good we have it now, and how hard it was then when we were raising four little ones. Someone was always screaming! Someone was always crying! And we all looked so young and virile.

Read the rest of this article on the Operation Us website.  See it here (click link).

For the parents of young adults, there are two types of moving-away-from-home events: the sad-beginning, and the happy-ending. The sad-beginning occurs when the youth leaves home for the first time. Lots of tears and anxiety accompany this departure. After a few weeks the parents realize that they can function without the young adult and the young adult thinks ditto. This event precedes the happy-ending moving-away event, which may not occur for several years. This is when the parents decide that the youth has established their own household and can finally take responsibility for all that stuff they left behind. And that is the event that my wife and I are celebrating this weekend. When I was young I couldn't understand the look on my parents' faces when they visited my house one afternoon with a carload of my former junk from their basement. They were beaming with joy. "Here is your stuff," they declared. Wait a minute, I thought, I don't have room for all this stuff. Can't you just keep it for a while longer? Don't you have plenty of room in that big house of yours?

Read the rest of this article on the Operation Us website.  You can see it here (click link).