Karl and his kids, "demonstrating kindness" at his birthday dinner.
Karl is a really great father...he has a ton of solid parenting instincts that I am forever impressed by. When it comes to raising kids, he seems to know exactly when to hold em, when to fold em, when to walk away and and when to run.
(thank you Kenny Rogers)
Yesterday was his birthday and his gift from me was to divert some of the more unpleasant and emotional tasks generated by a bunch of kids with big feelings who all seemed to want immediate answers on the same day.
Which was of course, far more challenging than I anticipated.
But I was pleased to learn that I had crafted a sort of one size fits all angry speech to most of their unreasonable and extremely melodramatic neediness.
As follows...
YOU can just go ahead and be really MAD at me for whatever lame reason you feel like coming up with but you have a really GREAT DAD who does a lot of really great stuff for you and LOVES you like crazy. And today is his BIRTHDAY! So be mad at me if you want but you need to demonstrate some kindness to you father now and today....MAN!
I put the "man" at the end so that I say what I really wanted to.. which would have been super uncool and inappropriate.
I delivered this speech more than a couple times throughout the course of the day to almost all of my kids and got pretty good at it. And weirdly, my angry speech worked...turns out yelling at my kids to be nice to their dad and mean to me was an acceptable kid compromise... effective too- at least for a day.
This morning, when I shared the behind the scenes view of our kids bad behavior on his birthday Karl was thrilled that I spared him of some of the more intense kid drama on his day. And also appreciative of my reenactment of the hostile, but effective, birthday speech that I had loudly shared and perfected without him knowing it.
So yeah... Happy Birthday, Man.
(thank you Kenny Rogers)
Yesterday was his birthday and his gift from me was to divert some of the more unpleasant and emotional tasks generated by a bunch of kids with big feelings who all seemed to want immediate answers on the same day.
Which was of course, far more challenging than I anticipated.
But I was pleased to learn that I had crafted a sort of one size fits all angry speech to most of their unreasonable and extremely melodramatic neediness.
As follows...
YOU can just go ahead and be really MAD at me for whatever lame reason you feel like coming up with but you have a really GREAT DAD who does a lot of really great stuff for you and LOVES you like crazy. And today is his BIRTHDAY! So be mad at me if you want but you need to demonstrate some kindness to you father now and today....MAN!
I put the "man" at the end so that I say what I really wanted to.. which would have been super uncool and inappropriate.
I delivered this speech more than a couple times throughout the course of the day to almost all of my kids and got pretty good at it. And weirdly, my angry speech worked...turns out yelling at my kids to be nice to their dad and mean to me was an acceptable kid compromise... effective too- at least for a day.
This morning, when I shared the behind the scenes view of our kids bad behavior on his birthday Karl was thrilled that I spared him of some of the more intense kid drama on his day. And also appreciative of my reenactment of the hostile, but effective, birthday speech that I had loudly shared and perfected without him knowing it.
So yeah... Happy Birthday, Man.
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