"You can't have two fun parents..." ~ Claire Dunphy, "Modern Family"

I'm not a helicopter parent.  I don't spend every second with my child hovering over him, making sure he does absolutely nothing out of line.  Don't get me wrong; I don't let him stand on the furniture, or stick his fingers in the electrical outlets, or play with chemicals under the sink or anything like that.  But when he runs over like he's going to climb up the stairs, I don't immediately chase him.  I normally ignore him for a second, and he comes back on his own, crisis (and tantrum) averted.

And, so far, being a laidback mom has worked pretty well.  My kid's healthy, smart, and has had only a couple ER visits.  One was for a bad ear infection, and the other was when he took a bite out of a glass holiday ornament (but seriously, that really wasn't my fault).  But all in all, my little man has been doing pretty well.

My husband's like me, and most of our extended family takes it pretty chill as well.  The exception is my dad, who cuts the kids' food up so tiny he might as well run it through a blender, and thinks every sneeze warrants a call to the doctor.  We all give him a hard time for being paranoid, and he's convinced we're all dangerously unsafe.

So of course it would be at his poppa's house that my son got his first major booboo.

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Letting your kids leave Nazareth.

"And Nathanael said to him, 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Philip said to him, 'Come and see.'" ~ John 1:46

Even in the happiest and most close-knit of families, there comes times when everyone dreads a big family get-together. Because there seems to be one thing that families everywhere are guilty of.

Not letting each other change.

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Important life lessons from the Pussycat Dolls.

You see, when I was younger I would say,
When I grow up, I wanna be famous
I wanna be a star, I wanna be in movies...

Sometimes I look around at the world around me, and I'm so overwhelmingly grateful that I was given a son and not a daughter. Not that I think that boys are superior; it just seems like they're less difficult to raise.

Culture just seems to be attacking little girls, their self-esteem and their self-image, from an earlier and earlier age. Look at that child on the left, a contestant from "Toddlers and Tiaras". She's a preschooler in veneers and Aquanet. It's creepy, but that's the standard of beauty that very little girls are presented with from the time they can walk.

And even if you can get away from the impossibly high expectations for outward appearance, what about the new perceived standards for success? When I was a kid, my friends wanted to be doctors, or racecar drivers, or artists. (I wanted to be a gymnast, despite the fact that I'm now just a couple of inches shy of 6 feet.) But whatever our dreams were, we understood that they were things we would have to strive to attain our entire lives, goals that would only be reached through hard work and talent.

What do little girls want to be now? Famous. That's it. Not famous for curing cancer, or famous for Oscar-worthy acting ability. The only desire is for celebrity, and all the trappings that come with that lifestyle. How you get there is insignificant.

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Christian feminist mom raising a Christian feminist son

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus." ~ Galatians 3:28

Many people tend to create a very specific, often negative, image of a "feminist" in their minds. Feminists wear ill-fitting suits and have butch haircuts, they're either openly lesbian or deep in the closet with mousy, browbeaten husbands. They play softball with alarming skill and own many cats.

This is a rather specific image, and its absurdity is obvious when paired against the literal definition of feminist, i.e. "a person who advocates equal rights for women".

I mean, I'm a feminist. My hair is short, but it's a pretty cute style, not butch at all. I have three cats, but I suck at softball. (I swing like I'm chopping wood.) And I don't think anyone who's ever met my husband would describe him as "mousy".

But somewhere along the way, people got it in their heads that feminism was somehow anti-Christian. Despite people like Saint Joan of Arc, who didn't let her gender stop her from leading armies, and who was subsequently martyred for it. Despite early church leaders, like Lydia and Chloe. Despite that groovy little verse from Galatians I quoted at the beginning.

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