June 2009 Lower Family Newsletter
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Chad T. Lower
May 30, 2009, 11:42:52 PM5/30/09
to LowerFamil...@googlegroups.com
Another month ends, and another month begins. That truth reminds me of the seasons of life--where one ends, the next one begins. Of course, the calendar has seasons as well, but I am talking about the seasons of life. As a parent, I can see the seasons of life I take with my children. John Rosemond describes the Seasons as such:
Based on Ecclesiastes 3:1, which says, "To everything there is a season," psychologist John Rosemond observes: "There are three seasons in raising children, and one final season that is our goal. Each season is a phase where a child needs a certain type of parenting.
Season One is from birth to two and is called the Season of Service. During this time, the mother’s sole responsibility as caretaker is to keep the child alive. Her every thought and action focuses on the helpless infant. She must do everything from feeding, changing, bathing and showering the babe with constant love and attention. She gets no sleep and has very little time for herself. The baby is the center of all attention and this point believes that his mom has been assigned to him for life. Also during this time, dad is on the sidelines performing duties as mom’s parenting aide.
Sometime between the ages of two and three a transition away from service should occur. This change can take a year, but the goal is a shift to Season Two.
How does mom encourage this transition? First, reduce the level of doing things for the child by increasing responsibility. Second, build a boundary and use freedom as currency. And third, reestablish the marriage relationship as priority.
Season Two is for ages three to 13 and is called the Season of Leadership and Discipline. During this stage, parents must transform the anti-social toddler to a child that consents to and accepts parental leadership. During the third year, the child should know that is her job to pay attention to her parents and not the other way around. Parents lead so that she follows, subscribes to family values and internalizes the leadership model. The goal is to prepare for the season of emancipation.
Season Three is for ages 13 to 18 and is called the Season of Mentoring and Emancipation. It is during this time that parents mentor their children who by now should be able to make mature decisions and self govern responsibly.
Season Four is adulthood for the child. You are no longer parenting but are your child's friend.
In explaining the seasons, Rosemond advises parents to focus on the proper season. Regrettably, many parents stay mired in season one (being a servant) when they should be teaching their children to take responsibility themselves. Another mistake is trying to be your children's friend before the appropriate season.
We have been in Season One with at least one child for the last 6 years. But parenting isn't the only place we find seasons. Marriage also brings with it seasons. On May 27, 2009, Suzy and I have officially been married for 9 years! Tim and Joy Downs don't define their marriage by how long or how many years they have been together. Rather, they define the length of their marriage by how many seasons they have been through. So, Suzy and I have been married for three pregnancies, two hemangiomas, seven moves, a home-based business, two educational degrees, five jobs, and a pig. Although we have been through many seasons, there are many more in our future. I can't wait to go through them side-by-side with God's perfect gift to me, my beautiful wife.
Based on Ecclesiastes 3:1, which says, "To everything there is a season," psychologist John Rosemond observes: "There are three seasons in raising children, and one final season that is our goal. Each season is a phase where a child needs a certain type of parenting.
Season One is from birth to two and is called the Season of Service. During this time, the mother’s sole responsibility as caretaker is to keep the child alive. Her every thought and action focuses on the helpless infant. She must do everything from feeding, changing, bathing and showering the babe with constant love and attention. She gets no sleep and has very little time for herself. The baby is the center of all attention and this point believes that his mom has been assigned to him for life. Also during this time, dad is on the sidelines performing duties as mom’s parenting aide.
Sometime between the ages of two and three a transition away from service should occur. This change can take a year, but the goal is a shift to Season Two.
How does mom encourage this transition? First, reduce the level of doing things for the child by increasing responsibility. Second, build a boundary and use freedom as currency. And third, reestablish the marriage relationship as priority.
Season Two is for ages three to 13 and is called the Season of Leadership and Discipline. During this stage, parents must transform the anti-social toddler to a child that consents to and accepts parental leadership. During the third year, the child should know that is her job to pay attention to her parents and not the other way around. Parents lead so that she follows, subscribes to family values and internalizes the leadership model. The goal is to prepare for the season of emancipation.
Season Three is for ages 13 to 18 and is called the Season of Mentoring and Emancipation. It is during this time that parents mentor their children who by now should be able to make mature decisions and self govern responsibly.
Season Four is adulthood for the child. You are no longer parenting but are your child's friend.
In explaining the seasons, Rosemond advises parents to focus on the proper season. Regrettably, many parents stay mired in season one (being a servant) when they should be teaching their children to take responsibility themselves. Another mistake is trying to be your children's friend before the appropriate season.
We have been in Season One with at least one child for the last 6 years. But parenting isn't the only place we find seasons. Marriage also brings with it seasons. On May 27, 2009, Suzy and I have officially been married for 9 years! Tim and Joy Downs don't define their marriage by how long or how many years they have been together. Rather, they define the length of their marriage by how many seasons they have been through. So, Suzy and I have been married for three pregnancies, two hemangiomas, seven moves, a home-based business, two educational degrees, five jobs, and a pig. Although we have been through many seasons, there are many more in our future. I can't wait to go through them side-by-side with God's perfect gift to me, my beautiful wife.
So how did we celebrate our 9-year anniversary? We wrote our wills. Although some might consider that morbid, what better way to show each other our love than by making sure our children are taken care of should something happen to us before our time. We used a website called LegalZoom. In hindsight, we should have created a will when we got married 9 years ago and updated it after each of our children's births. Better late than never, I suppose.
And speaking of the kiddos, Malachi is done with Pre-School for the year. He still wakes up and gets dressed so he is ready for school, though. Hasn't quite got the concept of "summer" yet. As part of the end of year activities at his school, they take a ride on the Hiawatha, a paddle boat that runs up and down the Susquehanna River. Suzy, Ali, and I were able to go along and enjoy the ride, followed by lunch under the pavilion.
Isabella won't be done with school for another week and a half, but then she will be going to summer school to help improve her reading and math skills before next year starts. Summer school will last a month. She is still doing soccer for a few more weeks and still enjoying it. The past few games have all been multi-scoring for her. Certainly a huge difference from the beginning of the season last fall when she was having trouble kicking the ball down field.
Alessandra is really making strides with her vocabulary. She is also starting to use sign language more, which is being reinforced at her story time at the library. We are also starting the potty training process. She will sit on the toilet, but hasn't gone in it yet. We put her on about once an hour. Today, she went in the bathroom and peed on the floor. I guess that's closer than anything so far.
At the end of the school year, Penn College has a Employee Appreciation Day at Knoebel's Amusement park. Although my brother technically graduated that same day, he decided to skip graduation, so my momma, Linda, and we went to Knoebel's for the day. Parking is free; you only pay for tickets for food and for rides. The kids had a good time. There was a magician there and I believe the oldest volunteer was about 6, so it was definitely kid oriented, but had fun stuff for all ages. For the last trick, the magician put Malachi to sleep (at least that is Malachi's version -- check the picture for yourself). We decided early on that the last ride of the day would be the Twister, a wooden roller coaster. Malachi and I sat together with Isabella in the seat behind us. When we got off the ride, Malachi shouted, "That was SUPER AWESOME!!!! I don't want to do it again!" I told him he didn't have to. Fortunately for us, our kids are tall, so Isabella could ride everything but the adult bumper cars and Malachi just made the minimum 42" for most of the non-"baby" rides.
Suzy is still plugging away at her writing. In fact, she hopes to attend two writers conferences this summer. We are trying to finalize arrangements for childcare while I am teaching and room/board while she is there. During those times, her blog http://passiton.today.com (your Daily Dose of Inspiration) may be vacant unless she can find access to a computer and pull herself away from the happenings at the conference.
Suzy is still writing articles for eHow. Again, all of her articles can be found at http://www.ehow.com/members/mrschadt-articles.html. Her popular ones are:
I have written three this month, but I have only been able to publish one due to a glitch in their system. We have emailed them about it, but it usually takes about 3 weeks for a response, so we are still waiting. In the meantime:
Although this newsletter was originally intended to update friends and family about our lives, I have used it for other purposes. Primarily to say that Jesus is the greatest man who ever lived. I have also made plugs for Skillet (one of my 3 top favorite bands) and just last month made a political request. I also like to educate people (hence my profession) and especially like to educate people about math. Turns out, a phone study was done recently to see if Americans understood how big a trillion is (like our national debt). The question was, "How many million are in a trillion?" Only 21% of Americans got the correct answer, and the majority guessed too small. (The answer is: a million million makes a trillion.) So in light of that information, take a look at http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/the-national-debt-road-trip/. Be sure to read the text as well as look at the video to see that is was intended to be nonpartisan and very conservative in the calculations of current numbers. (See also http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/the-national-debtroad-trip-complaint-1/ and http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/the-national-debt-road-trip-debt-to-gdp/ for more "behind the numbers" information.)
And finally, I am a big fan of free -- you can't beat the price!! As an addition to this newsletter, I wanted to add-on a few of my favorite freebies for your use as well.
The first one, I just came across last week, so haven't had a lot of time to use it yet, but I like what I see so far. A Netherlands company developed a (free) font for use on computers. It is based on the truetype font Sans Serif Veranda (I sent this Newsletter using Veranda) which is often used for business purposes. So what is the advantage? It has holes in it! The font puts empty circles within the letters and symbols which can save up to 20% of ink or toner when printing. In other words, you can print 6 pages for the same amount of ink or toner you would normally print 5. We have a laser that claims to print 2000 pages per cartridge. For us, it will give us an extra 400 pages before we need to change the toner. I will give a disclaimer: the font is larger than traditional fonts. Usually I use Times New Roman or Cambria at a 12 point font. I took an old document and converted it to the new font (it will be listed as Spranq Eco Sans). To keep the same pagination, I had to "shrink" the font to a size 10. For another document, I used size 9. (Their website recommends 9 or 10.) When printed, there is no readability problems up to size 48 which is the highest I tested. If I wasn't looking for holes in the text, they aren't really noticable until about size 18. On screen, because we view it larger than it prints, you will be able to notice the holes. Using ClearType can help reduce some of the obviousness. To get it, go to http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html. Once I installed the font, I went into my Word and Excel programs and changed the default font to Spraq Eco Sans 10pt.
Another thing I enjoy is music. But, I don't have a lot of time to listen to music outside my office (motorcycle doesn't have a radio and earphones are illegal in Pennsylvania). As I don't have a lot of time, I don't buy a lot of music. But there are several sites that offer free music that changes on a weekly basis. There are many available, but the two that I use the most are iTickets.com and FreeCCM.com. Both require free registration before you are able to download music. I usually go to the sites first thing Monday morning, listen to the songs, then save the ones I like to my computer. From the past school year, I probably have over 50 songs on my computer and paid for none of them. Some are artists I am familiar with. Others are new artists just coming onto the scene.
Also in my search for free music, I came upon Phil Wickham who has always wanted to do a "live album and a sing-a-long." Well, he did both just under a year ago (8/7/08) and is offering the entire album FREE! http://philwickham.com/downloads/singalong.zip The download is big (60 MB), so probably only want to attempt if you have high speed Internet. This is his fourth album release. I thought that, being free, it would be crap, but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoy listening to the entire album. A little softer than I usually listen to (I like hard rock). Cannons is probably my favorite song on the album.
If you have read any of my eHow articles dealing with computers and Internet safety, you have probably seen me reference MajorGeeks. On their website, they have a list of (what they call) Top Freeware Picks at http://www.majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=20. They have a lot of different programs to do a lot of different applications. I would recommend checking it out to see if there is anything there that you may be interested in using. I know before my wife and I were able to get Microsoft Office at a discount through my work, we used OpenOffice. Other programs I currently use are CCleaner, Spybot Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, SUPERAntiSpyware, Comodo Internet Security, Iobit SmartDefrag, Picasa, AI RoboForm (actually we used to use RoboForm, now we use LastPass), Revo Uninstaller, Secunia Personal Software Inspector. Over the years, we have used different other programs, some for long periods of time, others just to try. As always, before trying a new program, it is always recommended to do a backup of your computer.
And finally, I am a big fan of free -- you can't beat the price!! As an addition to this newsletter, I wanted to add-on a few of my favorite freebies for your use as well.
The first one, I just came across last week, so haven't had a lot of time to use it yet, but I like what I see so far. A Netherlands company developed a (free) font for use on computers. It is based on the truetype font Sans Serif Veranda (I sent this Newsletter using Veranda) which is often used for business purposes. So what is the advantage? It has holes in it! The font puts empty circles within the letters and symbols which can save up to 20% of ink or toner when printing. In other words, you can print 6 pages for the same amount of ink or toner you would normally print 5. We have a laser that claims to print 2000 pages per cartridge. For us, it will give us an extra 400 pages before we need to change the toner. I will give a disclaimer: the font is larger than traditional fonts. Usually I use Times New Roman or Cambria at a 12 point font. I took an old document and converted it to the new font (it will be listed as Spranq Eco Sans). To keep the same pagination, I had to "shrink" the font to a size 10. For another document, I used size 9. (Their website recommends 9 or 10.) When printed, there is no readability problems up to size 48 which is the highest I tested. If I wasn't looking for holes in the text, they aren't really noticable until about size 18. On screen, because we view it larger than it prints, you will be able to notice the holes. Using ClearType can help reduce some of the obviousness. To get it, go to http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html. Once I installed the font, I went into my Word and Excel programs and changed the default font to Spraq Eco Sans 10pt.
Another thing I enjoy is music. But, I don't have a lot of time to listen to music outside my office (motorcycle doesn't have a radio and earphones are illegal in Pennsylvania). As I don't have a lot of time, I don't buy a lot of music. But there are several sites that offer free music that changes on a weekly basis. There are many available, but the two that I use the most are iTickets.com and FreeCCM.com. Both require free registration before you are able to download music. I usually go to the sites first thing Monday morning, listen to the songs, then save the ones I like to my computer. From the past school year, I probably have over 50 songs on my computer and paid for none of them. Some are artists I am familiar with. Others are new artists just coming onto the scene.
Also in my search for free music, I came upon Phil Wickham who has always wanted to do a "live album and a sing-a-long." Well, he did both just under a year ago (8/7/08) and is offering the entire album FREE! http://philwickham.com/downloads/singalong.zip The download is big (60 MB), so probably only want to attempt if you have high speed Internet. This is his fourth album release. I thought that, being free, it would be crap, but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoy listening to the entire album. A little softer than I usually listen to (I like hard rock). Cannons is probably my favorite song on the album.
If you have read any of my eHow articles dealing with computers and Internet safety, you have probably seen me reference MajorGeeks. On their website, they have a list of (what they call) Top Freeware Picks at http://www.majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=20. They have a lot of different programs to do a lot of different applications. I would recommend checking it out to see if there is anything there that you may be interested in using. I know before my wife and I were able to get Microsoft Office at a discount through my work, we used OpenOffice. Other programs I currently use are CCleaner, Spybot Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, SUPERAntiSpyware, Comodo Internet Security, Iobit SmartDefrag, Picasa, AI RoboForm (actually we used to use RoboForm, now we use LastPass), Revo Uninstaller, Secunia Personal Software Inspector. Over the years, we have used different other programs, some for long periods of time, others just to try. As always, before trying a new program, it is always recommended to do a backup of your computer.
May God bless you over these next few months.
--
Chad T. Lower
a.k.a. Chopper
http://chadtlower.tripod.com/
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Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others.
Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.
Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.
Philippians 2:3-4
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