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60 One-Minute Family-Builders By By David & Claudia Arp We remember some of our family vacations – some were more special than others. While we were living in Europe, we had a wonderful family vacation in Norway, and we still remember eating fresh shrimp in the rain in Oslo. But there are other vacations we’d like to forget – like the camping trip. Special family vacations are fine, but the relationships with our three sons were built more through the many things we did in the little minutes and moments of dailies – our ten-minute chats, candlelight breakfasts, laughing together at Dad’s sour humor (our boy’s name for Dave’s spontaneous and sometimes not-so-funny jokes). Since out three boys were born within five years, it was good we could laugh together! Life isn’t always funny with the Arps’. We remember a toddler decorating a wall with his favorite colors of crayons and preschoolers throwing rocks at cars. In the elementary years they graduated to water balloons. We remember giving trust over and over again to our teens when they blew it and times when we realized that we, as parents, had blown it too. The problem with being a parent is that by the time we are qualified, we’re also unemployed. None of us are perfect parents. Dr. Howard Hendricks says that it’s okay to make mistakes as long as we are willing to be honest with our children. Face it: they live with us; they already know we’re not perfect! The god news is that we don’t always have to be so serious to wear the perfect parent mask. We’ve decided that at our house, we would rather err on the side of being too much, laughing and having too much fun, concentrating too much on relationships, than on the side of being too serious, too sober, and too sad. We wanted to enjoy parenthood while we lived through it.
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