1.47 million orange slices! That’s how many orange slices our family provided throughout the years at our boys activities and sporting events. Or at least it felt like that many! So what’s deal with orange slices anyway?!?! When Trevor and Alex were young, their favorite thing, like most of the kids that age, was the orange slices at the end of the game or activity. For them, nothing was better than to share delicious, sweet [...]
There are a thousand things to take up one’s time: Responsibilities at work, emails, organizing and paying the bills, the abundance of life’s maintenance like cooking and laundry, mowing the lawn and taking out the trash, school events, sports events, and unending child socials, and then throw in your own socializing and time to just relax in front of a Netflix movie. Why would you take what few precious unscheduled moments that remain and volunteer [...]
OneFamily is all about equipping, encouraging and sustaining couples as they journey in their marriages and parenting. Many of the concepts, principles and ideas that we share each week, in our OneFamily letter and quotes, are derived from the Growing Families curriculum we have taught for the past 16 years. As a result, we would be remiss if we didn’t make you aware of a fantastic opportunity to learn and connect with other families that [...]
It's graduation season! There are preschoolers graduating to Kindergarten, Kindergartners to Elementary School, Elementary to Middle School, Middle Schoolers to High School and so on. All graduations, to varying degrees, have commencement addresses. These speeches are designed to impart wisdom and encourage students as they move to the next chapter in life. We recently came across a fantastic commencement address that has a simple message which is as applicable to the college graduate as to [...]
In every life there is a transition from the essence of youth into the experience of adulthood. Often within this transition is an episode that stands out as a hinge point of meaningful experience, which is designated as “the event” that dislodges understanding from the rock of ignorance. These hinge point experiences are retold as testimonies. As authors of these weekly letters to you, we continually confront the question as to what is valuable, what’s [...]
These Letters are intended to provide you with whatever insights we have gained over the last 30 years of parenting and marriage. Our perspectives are not comprehensive, just intending to spark thought on how to take your parenting and marriage to the next level of effectiveness. There is so much to say to you which we hope is instructive and encouraging, perspectives we wish we had ‘back in the day’. We had to figure it [...]
When our boys were younger we overloaded and overwhelmed our lives by trying to take advantage of every opportunity life presented. We believed that we had plenty of time and life would get less busy and overwhelming in the near future. We naively thought balance and getting less busy in our lives would somehow occur on its own. Fortunately we discovered that life’s balance doesn’t just happen on its own and we’ve come up with [...]
“Every day is Valentine’s Day!” is the usual quip Rich jokingly says to Shelly EVERY Valentine’s Day. Yet, joking aside, it does lead to a very important question. Are you intentionally expressing your love on a daily basis and is it being received effectively? Or is it only intentionally expressed on special occasions… like Valentine’s Day? Simply saying “I love you” every day is nice, but sometimes it’s meaning can easily become diluted and be [...]
Parenting is a process that has many seasons and phases. There were times in our own parenting when we could easily get stuck in a particular season or phase. Typically we would become comfortable in the strategies that were working and forget to look ahead to the upcoming season in our boys’ growth and development. Before we knew it, Trevor and Alex had outgrown our parenting! Three Key Areas To Watch Evaluating kids’ freedoms and [...]
Shawn and I were beginning to feel desperate. Disagreements with each other were becoming more frequent and our kids’ behaviors were spiraling out of control as a result. We couldn’t seem to get on the same page when it came to parenting tactics, and truthfully, neither of us had a clue what we were doing. Differing, and often unspoken expectations about the way we were brought up and therefore the way we should be parenting [...]