Priorities

I have never been a blogger and I don't know if there is a blogger etiquette. Are you supposed to write responses to other blogs sometimes or do you just write whatever? In any event, today I am going to write in response to an earlier post of Kim's, Priorities.

You are right to spend time with your kids when they want you. My youngest daughter graduated from college this past May and my older son (24) just asked his long-time girlfriend to marry him. Wow! These milestones are the things that are supposed to happen and they are wonderful, but I still remember moving my son from the crib and putting him into his first big-boy bed. Where did the time go?

We still have good relationships with both our children, but they are becoming adult relationships. Notice I used the word "becoming". A friend of mine told me before I had my first child that there was no love better or stronger than the love a child for its parents. I was about to encounter an unconditional love. He was right. Raising children has been the best and most important thing I will ever do. By devoting yourself to the responsibility, you pave the way for those adult relationships to form. Even though I am proud of the people my children have grown into and are becoming, there is nothing to compare with the feel of a small child's head asleep on your shoulder or their warm little body curled up next to yours because they are afraid of a thunderstorm. Grab every one of these moments you can because, it's not that they won't want to be with you when they grow up, it will just be different.