The things that define us.

Last Sunday before bed Chad and I were laying on our magnificent bed (it's the best bed! (it was the first thing we bought after Chad graduated from law school. If you haven't got a good bed, then you have nothing. NOTHING!)) chatting about our children and what an awesome responsibility it all is. I mean parenthood is just so all encompassing; you get these little humans and you have the opportunity to influence how they will view the world and themselves. Some of the major things we considered:

• what are our priorities?
• what characteristics do we want to engender? 
• what do we spend our time doing?
• how can we influence them?
• how can we help them overcome individual weaknesses?
• what does it mean to be a Mead?

I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty deep stuff. Hours later we'd covered each child's individual needs. We talked about how to compensate for weakness and how to help them develop a strong identity.

Some of the obvious answers to our questions are to pray with them and read scriptures together, etc. We do these things but we can always do better. When I look around and see families that are raising great kids--full of values and just plain goodness--I see the same patterns. Here's a few of them:

• Time--There's no substitute for spending time together. We like to play games, read, walk, hike, chat poolside (see above), play tennis. Do whatever you like and do loads and loads of it. (I'm writing these more to memorialize my thoughts than to instruct you the reader. These are the things that we want to do more consistently.)
• Traditions--having family rituals seems important. These are the things that seem like "our" things--the things our family does because it's "us." Some of them are the Friday Night movie night, the Saturday morning breakfast, Sunday walks, family reading time, special family places, ongoing activities (Lily and I are currently sewing together every week and she dies of happiness over it. Chad takes the boys to play chess and to the movies (he's taking the kids to the circus next week (some sacrifices are required to be a good parent)).
• Sayings--when Chad and I were dating we often say it was "it's you and me against the world!" I have no idea why we came up with this but it stuck and has been something that we say to each other every so often. It reminds us that we're in this together. A few years ago we started saying "consider the happy state of those who keep the commandments" to our kids; a scripture from the Book of Mormon.
• Work--Good kids work. A LOT. Work is something families should do together, every day yard work, house work, school work are all required for the kids' well-being and to help others. We knew a great family that scheduled their boys' Saturdays for them (you've got to mow the Meads' lawn at 8:00 and pull weeds at the Johnsons at 9:30, etc.). These boys saved a lot by doing this, they learned a number of handy skills and were terrific boys, every single one.
• Example--the parents that I see raising great kids walk the walk. They are the people that they want their children to be. Being is so much more powerful than saying or seeming to be. This one is a real struggle; not that Chad and I are struggling with huge demons, but we may have let inappropriate movies or music slide in the past, thinking that the kids wouldn't notice. Two things, one, if these things are inappropriate, then we suffer the ill-effects even if the kids don't actually see us doing the bad thing. Two, the kids are old enough to notice. Recently we heard someone talk euphemistically about sex in front of their kids, thinking that the kids wouldn't pick up on it. I think it's best to assume that your kids will pick up on subtle things; I certainly did at their age. 

Chad observed that we need to ingrain our values deeply into our kids so that when they're alone in the world and faced with a bad choice--they will appreciate the consequences of that choice. If we've instilled pride in being a Mead (for whatever reason), and they know that Mead's don't do X or Mead's do do Y, then we increase the chances of them staying on the right path. I guess we're just reminding ourselves of the proverb: "train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it."

One of the best parts of marriage is having a partner who cares about the same things you do (and just as much as you do). For example, it's deeply satisfying to reflect together on when a certain little boy refused to eat by his mouth as a three-year-old and drooled so much that you had to change his sopping wet shirt at 10 in the morning and contrasting it with how he's making eggs and toast for the family and managing not have a single bit of saliva out of place. All of our kids have overcome obstacles that were once difficult. Chad feels the greatest of these victories as much as I do and knows that in the remaining time we have with them, there's so much left to do. We can accomplish great things together, producing strong, capable, kind, Christlike adults that make their world and the people they come into contact with better. Our above reflections of these issues helps us clarify what we are trying to accomplish, how important it is, and how we're going to get there. This isn't the whole list, but it's a good start.