How do I keep my kids when mommy is away? A secret dad’s guide

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This post has some insider information for the guys, so ladies – you may either want to click away – or – share this with the men in your life depending on your take on all this.

I want to help you with something that I think will transform your marriage.

A day is coming that will present a defining moment for you. When this moment arrives, I want you to not only recognize it, but make it your moment to shine.

If you have kids, the time is coming when your wife is going to say:

I’m going away for the weekend.

Now she may not say it exactly that way. She may spin it to sound like she has a church retreat or reunion or girls weekend or grandparent’s funeral to go to, but the underlying message is going to be the same.

I’m going away for the weekend. And you’re keeping the kids.

The reason this is a defining moment for you is because how you handle this will speak volumes to your wife. How you handle this may become the basis for many future discussions.

If you want to make this your moment to shine, when she tells you that she’s going away and that you’re keeping the kids, you say one thing and one thing only:

I think that’s great. You deserve a break.

And don’t you dare flinch when you say it. LIke bees and dogs, women can smell fear when it comes to their kids’ caregivers. (I don’t think that’s actually true, but it serves the purpose of this post, so I’m going with it.)

The confidence you show in that moment will be a gift to her while she’s gone. If you’re timid or half-hearted about keeping your own kids for a weekend, she’s going to be preoccupied while she’s away and won’t get to fully experience whatever it is she’s doing.

Once you’ve got your wife out the door, here’s how you survive the weekend when mommy’s away:

Relax. You can’t undo in two days what the two of you have worked together to accomplish as parents in the preceding years. You’re going to be fine.

Take charge. You’re not the babysitter. You’re the dad. You’re not 50% of the parenting equation, you’re 100% of the equation. Expect that your kids treat you like kids should treat a parent.

Keep routines. You’d think that throwing caution to the wind and being spontaneous and crazy would be the best recipe for a mom-free weekend. And it might be. My experience has been that with little ones, keeping up routines and rhythms (mealtimes, naps, snack times, etc.) is a great way to know where you stand. There’s value in having some milestones during the day for you – and the kids – to look forward to.

Have fun. I realize I just wrote about the value of keeping routines, but try to do some things you wouldn’t do on a typical weekend. If you normally play in your neighborhood, drive across town to the park with the new play structure. Stay up late and catch fireflies. Amp up the fun a little bit.

Accept help. Like it or not, people think dads are idiots. So when you’re alone with your kids you’re going to get all kinds of offers for help. Your wife’s friends are going to offer playdates. Your in-laws are going to offer to feed all of you. If you want, take the help.

Solo parenting isn’t easy. You’ll work your tail off for the whole weekend your wife is away. But when Monday rolls around and you head back to work, I guarantee you miss those kids in a way you never have before.

When your wife comes to you with the magic words that she wants to get away for a weekend, give her the gift of a worry-free break. And seize the opportunity to connect with your kids while you’ve still got ‘em under your roof.

Friday Linking for Thinking

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This has been a goofy week around our place, so my normal schedule has been off. For that reason, I don’t have as much to share in today’s Friday Linking for Thinking.

But here are two items you might find interesting:

Good marketing vs. Bad Marketing from Simon Sinek at Start with Why.

7 Steps for Creating a Creative System to be More Creative by Jeremie Kubicek on the Catalyst blog. Think they’re committed to your creativity?

And in case you missed it, we had two posts up here this week:

Five ways to make 2012 a great year

Why your information sources matter

Got big plans for the weekend?

Why your information sources matter

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Back in December, I had the chance to help the local university screen applicants for a leadership scholarship.

Along with half a dozen other grown ups, it was my job to ask questions of these high school seniors and then make judgments about their responses.

It was fascinating.

The questions and answers were all over the map, but one question I found myself asking consistently was:

Where do you get your information?

I was curious to see – in today’s world of Twitter, The Facebook, blogging, texting and WUPHF – to what extent the younger set relies on mobile stuff for its information.

The surprising thing was that most of the kids said that they read the local paper or watched the evening news. Only a few mentioned mobile as their primary information source.

My conclusion was that one of the following must be true:

  • They were lying
  • They were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear
  • They were honest, and news consumption among that age group may be very low
  • They were honest, and news orgs have a long way to go in reaching kids under 18

Since then, I’ve been really curious about where other people get their information. I’ve asked a few of my clients and a few other people I know. I figure if I know how you inform yourself and how you reach conclusions, the better positioned I’ll be to help you.

I’ve also been thinking about how I get my information. It kinda goes in layers, like this:

  1. Twitter, on my phone: this is generally the first place I hear about news-y things
  2. Google Reader, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Wall Street Journal, on desktop computer – I would love to have put something more sophisticated than Yahoo! as news sources, but I’m just keeping it real
  3. Today Show, on the TV – I catch about 20 minutes of this while I’m getting ready for work
  4. Local newspaper, paper copy – I scan the local paper a few days per week

That’s how it works for me.

How about you? Where do you get your information?

Five ways to make 2012 a great year

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Did you set New Year’s Resolutions for 2012?

Now that we’re a few weeks into the year, how is it going? Are you seeing some success? Or have you already tossed 2012′s resolutions on the big pile of broken ones from years past?

I took the underachiever’s route this year: I simply didn’t set any New Year’s resolutions.

After resolving to several very specific things for 2011 and coming up short across the board, I decided this year I’d just commit to one thing. I told myself I’d write more this year than I did last year.

Lucky you.

In that one dimension – writing – I believe I can put in the effort and measure the outcome of my effort so that I’ll know if I’ve had a better year than 2011.

If New Year’s Resolutions aren’t your thing, or if you’ve already broken your but you still want to make 2012 a great year, here are five things you might try in 2012:

Quit something. Most of us, in hopes of packing as much into life as possible, have massively overcommitted ourselves. Trust me when I tell you that the PTA, the church board, the United Way, the you name it, can function with out you. See what happens in other areas of your life when you take some of the pressure off of your schedule.

Be a better friend. As kids, our friends and our parents are our entire lives. Somewhere along the way, friendships get pushed down the list of priorities. If we’re not very intentional about friendships as adults, they can dry out over time. Expect better friendships in 2012, but expect better friendships by being a better friend. Make more calls, send more emails, extend more invitations. Ask your spouse for some backup to help you in your cause to enrich a few relationships. A year in which you feel more connected to the people you like the most is bound to be a great year.

Read more. What kind of stuff do you like to read? I like to read non-fiction, business-y books. I can’t remember finishing a single book this year that didn’t have highlights I wanted to apply at work or share with a friend. Mary Craig likes to read fiction. She’s always in a novel and is a great person to ask for a book recommendation. Nothing stimulates the brain like reading, and books connect you to people. One way to have a great year is by dialing up your reading.

Get a notebook. I can still remember the day I bought my first nice notebook. I got it in a bookstore on my lunch break. I’ve used it during my quiet time to make notes on what I’m reading in the Bible. I have another notebook like it to jot down ideas for this blog for 2012. I keep notebooks for two reasons. First, it’s a gift to Future Leighton. I look forward to opening these notebooks at some point in years from now and reflecting on this point in my life. Second, writing reflectively in a journal makes magic happen between the brain and the hand. No lie. Words will show up on the page that I can’t mentally account for – deep, thoughtful words. Capture what’s going on and learn about yourself by getting a good notebook and writing in it.

Give yourself away. Here’s something I know about you: you’ve got something amazing. You’re an amazing piano player, or baker, or surgeon, or accountant, or realtor. You have an amazing China collection, an insane home theater system, an unbelievable front porch swing. You’re amazingly helpful or analytical or funny or compassionate. Maybe you’re just a crusty ol’ jackwagon with a ton of money. Pour it out. Give it away. Show that stuff to the world and let it multiply in other people. Find out what happens in 2012 when you give yourself or your money or your knowledge away.

Do you think incremental improvement is the way to go or do you like traditional New Year’s Resolutions?

Friday Linking for Thinking

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Thanks to Brian for jumping in last week and suggesting a name for this weekly feature. We’ll go with Linking for Thinking for now.

Here’s some stuff worth reading from around the World Wide Web this week:

Training Yourself to See New Strategic Options at Fast Company. Get inside the minds of the greatest chess players to know how to make better choices.

Margins by Kelly at Love Well. Kelly writes with clarity and wisdom about priorities and the season of life her family is walking in right now. She got my attention with this post.

Monday was the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I thought Lora Lynn’s post When Dreams Come True was a simple and symbolic statement of all that Dr. King accomplished.

And from what I can tell, it looks like my RSS feed wasn’t working properly, so there’s a chance you may have missed some of the hot blogging action going on around here. Here are this week’s posts:

What is too much to give?

Five things I know about being a leader

That’s it for this week. What’s something funny that happened to you this week?

Five things I know about being a leader

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At some point in my childhood, I can remember hearing my parents tell me:

“Do your best. Remember, you’re a leader.”

As a kid, the “you’re a leader” part threw me for a loop, because I pictured leaders as army generals and guys in marching band uniforms with the tall hats and batons.

Cut me some slack. I was a kid.

All that to say that my definition of “leader” was a little fuzzy.

These days, I see things a little better. I understand that I do have leadership roles, some of which I have chosen and some of which I’ve sort of matured into.

The intentional family is fertile ground for leaders. To stop the flow of culture and say as a family, “No, we’re doing it our way” will build the character and leadership of everyone in the family.

With that in mind, here are five things I know about being a leader:

I need to show the path. Most of what I do in my professional life and in the community is about taking people from where they are currently to where they want/need to be in the future. I never expect someone to take the entire journey in one step, but that’s probably what they think I’m going to ask them to do. I’m most effective as a leader when I show a clear picture of a destination but then show the specific path toward that destination and ask for one step at a time.

I need to make decisions. In my mind, I have this awesome study with ceiling-high bookshelves and a few windows and a nice big desk with a big fat Mac for writing. That’s where I go to figure out hard problems or work on decisions that need more research than I can give in just a quick moment. The only trouble is, the study is fictional and the time to figure out hard problems and research things is fictional, too. They don’t exist. I constantly put things off until later thinking I’ll be able to make a better decision under better circumstances, but I never go back and make the decision or the better circumstances. For the things that don’t need the counsel of my wife, the best thing to do is just make a decision and move on.

I need to value people with my time. How we spend our time with people will communicate a lot to them. They’ll see whether we’re fully present, whether we’re generous with our time or whether we treat our time as something to be earned. For the sake of relationships, time is best used as something to be given freely for the benefit and building up of the other person.

I need to look for who’s next. Good leaders attract other leaders and good leaders raise up other leaders. So when you see an organization with one leader, you’ve got to wonder what’s really going on there. It’s a mark of success and maturity to bring up people in professional and community contexts to move into the roles I occupy now. In the context of family, it means pouring into the kids to give them eyes to see in increasing degrees the opportunities and responsibilities all around them.

I need to grow. The only reason I know any of this stuff is because God has seen fit to put me in places where I can see it playing out. I’m growing into these things as I see good leaders do them. But these aren’t the only things leaders do, so I need to maintain a student’s heart in the hopes of seeing more.

Those are five things I know about being a leader. What one thing would you add?

What is too much to give?

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When the keynote speaker was finished giving his presentation, the emcee got back up to the podium and after a few brief comments, the room went silent.

A former colleague had invited me to a fundraising luncheon for a nonprofit and we were at the moment when everyone fills out their pledge cards.

I didn’t have a connection to the nonprofit and wasn’t particularly engaged by the event, so I started doing some quick calculations in my head. I tried to figure out what my share of the cost of the event would have been, so I could get out of there without the nonprofit losing money on me.

I’ve faced numerous situations like that, where I find myself asking: What’s the least I can do? What’s the bare minimum I can give?

If I’m being honest, I can’t tell you that I’m rid of that. But as our family aims toward MEANINGFUL GIVING it’s time to wrestle with a different question.

At some point in this process, we’ve got to know where we stand in relation to this question:

What is too much to give?

As you read that, I don’t want you to take that the wrong way. I don’t want you to picture some jackwagon in a smoking jacket sitting in a mahogany-paneled den sipping single-malt Scotch and trying to figure out how many zeroes he should add to the end of his check to the animal shelter.

That scenario assumes that resources are unlimited.

Our family’s reality is that our resources have an end point. So, within the confines of the resources available to us, what is too much to give?

How much of what we have – our possessions, our time, our personalities – would we be willing to make available for others?

I don’t know how you arrive at your answer to the big question. For me, I think you get there by asking tons of smaller questions like:

  • How deeply would we invest our money if we felt strongly about a particular cause or need?
  • Would you be willing to give your reputation?
  • Would you be willing to lay down all the work you’ve done to this point?
  • Would you be willing to give your health?
  • Would you be willing to give the safety of your children?
  • Would you be willing to re-engineer your schedule to free up time to give?

Somewhere in there, I’ll bet you rub up against something that feels like an electric fence. I’m guessing that when it comes to the present or future well-being of your kids, putting that in harm’s way will be off limits.

Good. Now you know one thing that is too much to give.

Keep asking questions until you’ve figured out the things that are completely non-negotiable for your family.

Once you’ve taken those things off the table and out of your discussion, all you have to do is figure out to what degree and in what manner you’re willing to give in the other areas.

What do you think? What is too much to give?

How do you decide?

Friday roundup

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Want to help me out?

I’m looking for a name for this Friday feature other than “Friday roundup.” A “roundup” feels like we should be sitting around a campfire in chaps and cowboy hats eating some chili that a guy we call Cookie made for us.

And I’m reluctant to call it “Friday links” because that sounds like something you might eat with eggs and toast. I don’t know. I’m open to your suggestions.

With that said…

Here’s another collection of some great stuff. I hope you find it helpful:

Forget Big Data. How About Starting Small? by Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent put into words something I’ve been thinking for a long time. Companies miss opportunities because they don’t capitalize on what they already have.

Learning vs. Arrogant Organizations: A Lesson in Survival by Maurilio Amorim. Many organizations, rather than merely stumbling towards diminishing returns, are actually headed for obsolescence. Maurilio defines the difference maker.

Stop Waiting to be Picked by Jeff Goins is a must read for everyone. Jeff’s audience is primarily writers, but the truth is good for everyone: You don’t need permission in life. You can give it to yourself. Go read Jeff’s post.

And here’s something to make you laugh this week: Important New Emoticons at McSweeney’s.

In case you missed it, we had two posts up here this week:

Deep relationships and different conversations

Unraveling the web of overcommitment

What has been the best part of your week so far?

Unraveling the web of overcommitment

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Every now and then I’ll talk to someone who is absolutely at the end of their rope.

Tired. Stressed out. Depressed. Hopeless.

Running on a treadmill of money worries, relationship issues or job problems.

The scenery never changes. The pace never changes. The energy level never improves. Yet they keep putting one foot in front of the other in time with the treadmill.

Depending on the day, sometimes I’m the guy on the treadmill.

Most of the folks I run into who are at the end of their rope got that way because they overcommitted themselves somewhere along the way.

Dad couldn’t say no to taking on the extra load at work. Mom didn’t want to be left out of the weekly Bible Study.

Dad feels bad for working late, so he volunteers to coach tee-ball two nights a week. Mom discovers that the 45-minute weekly Bible Study has three hours a week of homework that go with it.

Repeat that scenario over and over, with the web of commitments widening and tangling each time, and all of a sudden there’s a mess.

You might know someone who is on the treadmill right now. You might be the one.

If you need to unravel yourself from a nasty web of commitments, grab one at a time and ask these questions about each thing:

Why am I doing this?

Who am I doing this for?

Does the person I’m doing it for know I’m doing it for them?

If the person I’m doing this for knew how much it was costing me in terms of mood and stress, would they still expect me to do it?

What happens if I stop doing this?

Until you get off the treadmill, the scenery will never change, the pace will never change and your energy level won’t improve.

Have you been overcommitted? What did you do about it?

Are you overcommitted now? Can you picture a time when you’re not overcommitted?

Deep relationships and different conversations

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I work in a bank.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but banking is a pretty crowded field. You probably drive past five or six banks on the way to your bank.

Since the landscape is so competitive, we’ve got to be on the lookout for ways to stand out from the crowd. I’m convinced that one way to stand out is by having different conversations with our customers than other banks are willing to have with theirs.

For us, I think it means asking a customer, “What do you need this money to do for you?” when they start a relationship rather than simply taking their instruction. Knowing what the customer really needs their money to do for them (grow, stay safe, generate income) is the key to recommending the right solution. And recommending the right solution creates a better relationship than simply taking an order.

But it all hinges on having a different conversation.

Deep relationships are interwoven with different conversations.

One way you can tell a relationship has some legs is if someone is willing to go below the surface to engage you even when it’s uncomfortable for you and/or them.

My wife opened my eyes to this a few weeks ago.

She said that in the days after our miscarriage in 2008, her friends kept their distance for the most part. Not wanting to upset her or poke at the wound, they didn’t say much about the miscarriage.

One friend stepped out of her own comfort zone and asked her while they were riding somewhere in the car together: “So how are you doing with everything?”

My wife says it meant the world to her that someone asked. Especially when the answer was almost certain to be, “I’m not okay.”

Do you want to intentionally deepen a few key relationships in your life? Start having different conversations with those people.

Who’s one person in your life who is willing to have those types of conversations with you?