If you give your child something, then please realize that it’s now theirs. And “theirs” means theirs to do with it as they want (barring harm to self, others, or others property).

“Hey, neighbor - take my old grill!”

You would think it rather odd if your neighbor happened to offer you his old grill after upgrading his, and then proceeded to badger you for the next couple of months because you weren’t covering it when it was going to rain, or constantly bugging you about not cleaning it often enough. 

A recent blog post at www.bloggerdad.com prompted me to put down some of my thoughts on spanking.

I remember, back when Cole was still in diapers. I was  standing in the kitchen with mop in hand, cleaning the kitchen floor - just prior to asking Cole not to try to carry his bowl of apple sauce by himself. I would help, I told him, as soon as I was done. Against my wishes, he grabbed the bowl of apple sauce, and after taking no more than two or three steps, it slipped from his grip and hit the ground - an applesauce explosion covering as much clean territory as possible. I proceeded to reprimand him and punctuated my scolding with a swat on his diapered bottom.

I love dinner time conversation. Yesterday, I wrote a quote up on one of the dining room whiteboards (see my previous post about my Ikea glass whiteboards http://bit.ly/nBWf5).

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Martin Luther King

Recently, we’ve been implementing a points system for household chores (topic of a future blog post). Basically, you get a certain amount of points for various chores, and points can be redeemed for prizes. What I quickly discovered is that with four children of various ages, one prize does not fit all! I immediately saw that I needed to be individually creative to come up with something that floated each person’s boat.

This reminded me of something I’ve been a big fan of for many years: The Five Love Languages. 

I believe that the epicenter of cultural preservation is the kitchen.

I love our American culture, but I have a special love of other cultures as well. My father is Lebanese, so I had the good fortune of being exposed to a healthy dose of Arabic tradition. Keeping that tradition alive has been a challenge, however, as most of the original immigrants in the family have passed away and 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th generations have all but assimilated into the current American way of life. But recently, I had an opportunity to bring some of that culture back into our household.

Someone recently complimented the layout of my blog. I told them that my 17 year old son gets the credit for that. He’s the up-and-coming Web design genius. Which got me thinking. Are you preparing your children to be geniuses? More specifically, are you preparing them to be geniuses at living life?

Back when I thought I wanted to become a doctor, I was working in the Emergency Room of a major hospital. One afternoon, I was sipping on a coffee in the break room, chatting with one of the ER docs. My adrenalin was flowing as he had just revived someone from a cardiac arrest. Excitedly, I asked him, “Don’t you love medicine?!” With an emotionless expression, he looked at me and said, “If I had to do it all over, I’d have gone into dentistry. More pay, less hours.”

My 8 year old would like to have her own chauffeur. My 10 year old would love to get private guitar lessons from a rock star. And my 14 and 17 year olds would like nothing better than to have their own landscape maintenance engineer to do the mowing and leaf raking for them. And now, to some degree, they can!

It’s almost 3:00.  We’ve been done with school for an hour and everyone has gone their separate ways, occupying different parts of the house, engaging in different activities.  Tylor is in his room doing Web development.  Gabriella is curled up in the bay window reading the latest installment of vampire-love drama, and the younger kids are out on the trampoline.  But at 3:00, three, four or even five of us will converge to the kitchen to prepare our favorite cup of tea.

We generally save up the majority of our TV viewing for the weekend - Friday night in particular.  As any kid in the neighborhood can tell you, Friday night is “Movie Night” up in our older kids’ bedroom (although more often than not, it’s simply a marathon viewing of their favorite shows queued up on the DVR).  My kids usually make a pretty big deal out of it with pizza and antipasto salad, and a good dose of hoopla and eager anticipation.  Gen and I usually enjoy a glass of wine and a bit of quiet time with our own pizza down in the family room.

Last night I learned that my youngest son likes the Sunday comics more than he likes snowboarding. Snowboarding was my pick, so that’s why I only got one point on that round.  The kids learned that their Grandpa, although he likes sunsets and eating out, enjoys libraries even more. I don’t recall who got the points on that one.