Some Thursday Musings (from the sofa)

Mrs C says that I should write more and post less links to other people. This morning I read two books that have been on the pile for a while and they were quite helpful in different ways.  One of them was called 'Turn around at Home' which I bought for £2.99 and I promised to read it and glean some parenting wisdom. Well, I am happy to be able to report that I have done that. The other was about marriage and 'Dating' called 'Date your wife'.

Turn your home around: I'll be honest it's not the best book in the world but it had three sections on legacy's which you had to answer questions about and tot up the scores which Mrs C and I did. Oh and it's American so has a rather different context. Anyway, we both answered the questions and found out we had similar legacy scores. The three legacies are Spiritual/ Emotional/ Social and you are asked to reflect on your family environment growing up and mark accordingly. We had a pretty good chat as we did it which was, in itself, probably worth £2.99. It then has a section called tool kits for marriage, parenting young kids, parenting older kids and a section for grandparents with a few quite helpful ideas. If there is a big idea then its really very simple. If you invest in your marriage and your spiritual/emotional and relational life at home then the parenting thing flows from that and your kids discipleship and development should by grace turn out OK.

'Date your wife': It starts with a bit of a rebuke of men for generally being useless ('idiots'  to use the  precise word) which felt heavy-handed and to be honest the Appendix '100 ways to date your wife' is the best bit. The big idea here is that when you fall in love and date etc husbands in the main make a big effort and then, so the hypothesis goes, when you marry you stop doing that and metaphorically buy a pipe and slippers, watch TV and potter in the shed.  In other words, you stop dating. The book is probably not bad to give a marriage a bit of romance and a spiritual/gospel health kick and, not being the most creative of bods, the list of interesting date night ideas was good. Hopefully Mrs C will bear witness to my putting the pipe and slippers to one side in favour of all sorts of exciting and creative dating adventures. We'll see....