Memories

Another year ended huh? I bet it’s been a doozy. You had ups. You had downs. You had victories. You had disappointments.

And so did your kids.

So, how will each of you remember it? Will you remember it? What will mark the completion of a season, what will cement the lessons learned from its events, what will bring healing from its conflicts and pains?

Sometime late in the year, I heard someone mention the idea of capturing each year’s events and themes in a kind of family history. It got me thinking…

The Aldin family could certainly benefit from such a tradition.

And so the idea I came up with a few years ago was to keep a permanent record of the  years in the form of a ‘book’. For all I know, it’s been done before. But not by our family. And hey, it only lasted a couple of years :) ... but your family might make it work better. (I think I waited til the kids were too old to get caught up in the idea).

Each of us gets to answer the questions below, and choose two digital photos that represent our favourite memories of the year just gone. Then on New Year’s Eve, we’ll read our answers and “talk story” about 2011, before placing them in the book.

The questions can be very simple:

• My favourite movie this year:
• I really enjoyed going to the __________ because _____________________.
• Three cool things about my birthday:
• My holiday:
• A cool thing that God did:
• My achievements:
• The hardest thing I had to do was…
• Something I wish didn’t happen:
• A funny thing I heard:

2011 has been an incredibly emotional year for us, full of the extremes of  frustration and celebration, conflict and making new friends, villains and heroes, kids celebrating milestones and my wife and I both changing jobs, etc etc. What was yours like? And do you have a family tradition to close out the year and leave a record for your kids for later ?

Tics

Not ticks like a dog would get but tics like a twitch...

Occasionally between the ages of 4 and 8, our Youngest Son would start blinking like crazy. Sometimes to the point of making a little headtwitch with it. He’s such a cool guy, it pained us to see it happen. It seems to have settled down now. Each doctor we took him to said it was probably an allergy, though we’ve not been able to find what out what kind. It's since disappeared...

However, I found information like the following both reassuring and helpful in terms of responding well to the ‘behaviour’ while it was happening.

NOTE: The following information and advice is taken from the Raising Children Network…

Tics are muscle spasms that cause jerky movements, such as blinking, twitching of the face or jerky movements of the arm or shoulder, that seem out of the child’s control.

• The movement may start because of discomfort, e.g. blinking a lot may be caused by eyesight problems, and nose twitching may be caused by an allergy.
• A child can usually stop a tic for a short time if asked, but it sometimes comes back when she is not concentrating on stopping it.
• Sometimes tics are caused by health problems such as Tourette syndrome.
• Tics may be triggered by stress in the child’s life, e.g. learning difficulties, family problems.
• Tics can be very distressing to a child, and some children with tics are made more unhappy by being teased.
• If there is no underlying health problem, it is important to try to deal with any stress in the child’s life.
• Relaxation exercises may help.
• If the tic is very distressing for your child, and it does not go away after a few weeks, seek help from a health counsellor.

I’m going to add one more suggestion. Don’t make a big deal of it with the child. It often reinforces the behaviour rather than stopping it. It can make them feel helpless in the face of it and if it is stress-related, that will exacerbate the problem. The best piece of advice from the list above for me was about dealing with the stress. If our son’s blinking thing wasn’t allergy related, he was (at that time) quite prone to getting very stressed about things (the complete opposite to our Oldest Son) and so perhaps our work on removing his stressors and helping him with stress-management has been of benefit there.

Pregnancy Birth & Baby Hotline (Australia)

Launched on July 1, 2010, Australia’s Pregnancy Birth & Baby Hotline is a new service which aims to give women, their partners and families somewhere to turn for information and support on everything from reproductive health, pregnancy and birthing, through to their child’s first birthday.

The important things for readers of FoF is that male partners and new dads are one of the main focuses of the service. Hotline management said in a recent email to me, ’There is a growing understanding that dads need as much support during the early years of life as mums do, so there are two specialised male counsellors available on the helpline as well as trained staff who can provide information on local support networks and services for dads.’

To which I say, ‘Finally.’

See number in image above.

Pete Aldin talks Fatherhood

Hi there Dads and Mums everywhere. Below is the link to the recent interview with myself and my work colleague Steve Reid, at Christian radio program Family Life Australia.

We chatted mainly about why the Freakedout Fathers website was created, and what might stress Dads out (as well as what can be done!).

Enjoy!

http://familylifeaustralia.sermon.net/da/2734463/play

Even Dads Need to Defrag

I'm a life coach. No, no, don't close the window, hear me out!!

A Dad I was coaching (you don’t know him, folks, he’s never commented on this blog, stop guessing!), once lamented about the complete lack of time in his life to think, plan, pray. He lacked ”time away from the noise” as he put it.

Now this man deeply loved his wife and four kids, he loved his work. But he was the kind of guy (I think most of us are) who needed regular space just to clear his head, get some focus, think and even not have to think!

His wife and youngest child had health problems. His job meant 9 hours straight of interacting with people at way beyond the surface level, always giving out. He lived only a few minutes away from home and the trip home was nowhere near enough time to “change hats” from Worker to Dad.

Fellas, if you’re lucky enough to be living with your family (ie., not divorced or separated), and regardless of whether your wife is working or at home, whether you are a SAHD or a “working” Dad like my friend above (as if stay-at-home parents don’t work!), you need that time out that my friend was missing. (So does your wife, by the way).

I suspect this is why many men make the detour to the pub or bar on the way home, or actually stay back in the office when everyone else has left, just to have some peace and quiet where they don’t have to listen carefully, respond, mediate, etc etc. Unfortunately neither of these solutions is really meeting the need. You need time to relax and refresh, to let go of one role before taking on the next, a way to chill out…

Now don’t give me that crap about being too busy. If your wife said she’d been too busy to take the car in for its scheduled service 18 months ago, you’d go postal on her, so be consistent here dude…
Here’s some thoughts on the how and the what:

1. My coaching client above decided at first on ten-minute walks around the carpark at work during the day. He did this because his wife wan’t yet in a place to accept him taking a 30 minute detour anywhere on his way home at night. His workplace understood: most of them just thought he was exercising, while his mangers knew what he was up to and that he would come back into the office with a clearer mind.
2. A bunch of coaching buddies and I have a monthly practise, some of them call it a Refocus Day, I call it a Defrag Day. Some of them hike. I mix it up between a favourite sheltered cove/beach nearby and coffee shops, where I can just stare at the water, think, drink good coffee, read, plan, etc. Again, my coaching client above revived his own practises of halfdays away praying in the forest at a favourite spot by a stream.
3. One of my friends’ Dads had a great routine each night. He would come home, kiss his wife, say hi to the kids and then retreat to the lounge room with a paper (or occasionally with nothing) and just sit for 20   minutes. In that time, his wife enforced the rule that no one was to disturb him. And when he came back into the family space 20 minutes later, he was fully present with them.
4. This will take talking through with your partner, so get ready to sell it, to be vulnerable, to not be immediately understood. These go with the territory. But this is worth calmly persisting with…
5. Like most things to do with your inner world, you’re only going to get suggestions from me rather than a formula. You gotta try some things out, talk some things out, find your own solution here. The important thing is defrag your head and your life regularly and both will run better.

If you want to read a little more about this, try these posts:

• The Gift of Shabbat
• The Other Side of Midlife: Midlife Numbness
• Recovering from Mid-life Numbness
• and Being Doing

Gamers' Quest: a great read!

I love the online world. You meet some great people...

I recently had the pleasure of "chatting" (as in chat window) with Aussie author George Ivanoff. It’s well worth checking out George’s site especially if you have middle grade to young adult kids who like to READ.

My son has a copy of George's Gamers' Quest and I decided to ask some questions and give George a bit of free PR....

PETE: What is the main theme of Gamers’ Quest?

GEORGE: Reality! The two main characters in the book are computer constructs within a game environment, but they don’t know it. They think they are real people in a real world. As they progress through the various challenges they are faced with, they begin to question the nature of their reality. Eventually, they rise above their programming and become what they want to be. In many ways, the reader is asked to think about what constitutes reality.
Having said all this, the novel it primarily an action/adventure. So while this theme is running throughout the book, it is in the background rather than being slammed into the reader’s face.

PETE: I love the metaphor, and this might be a dumb question but why did you set your novel against a backdrop of computer gaming?

GEORGE:It all started with a documentary I saw on the ABC about online gaming. It was a fascinating insight into the lives of people who are seriously into gaming, but also an insight into the intricate worlds they ‘virtually’ inhabit online. That lead to me writing a short story called “Game Plan”, which was published in an anthology called Trust Me! (Ford Street Publishing, Melb., 2008). And this lead to me writing the novel.

There was also the desire to simply write the sort of book that I would like to have read as a teenager. As a teen I was obsessed with playing Space Invaders on my Atari console (yes, I’m a child of the 80s). I would have LOVED a book set inside a computer game.

PETE: Ah, Space Invaders. So many memories. So. Who do you hope will read this wonderful novel and what are they likely to get out of the experience?

 GEORGE: I hope that EVERYONE will read it! [George adds a happy emoticon to his chat at this point :) ]  It’s being advertised as suitable for 10+, but I think that teens should like it too. Certainly I’ve had good responses from teen readers as well as younger readers. I think that younger readers see it purely as a sci-fi adventure, whereas older readers see the deeper questions about reality.
My greatest hope is that it might attract some computer game players who wouldn’t normally read a novel. And what I would hope they’d get out of it is a realisation that reading can be as much fun as playing a computer game.

PETE: So how have you encouraged your kids to be readers?

GEORGE: There’s an old saying: lead by example. My kids are growing up watching my wife and I being avid readers. And we have both read to them since they were babies. My eldest daughter has followed in our footsteps and is really enjoying reading. My youngest is still at the being read to stage, but she really enjoys the time we spend going through the plethora of picture books that she’s been given.

PETE: You told me you’re a SAHD? What do you find are the specific positives and negatives of the Stay-At-Home Dad as compared to “work-away-from-home” Dad?

GEORGE: By far the biggest positive is being there as the kids are growing up. Working away from home would mean missing out on all the little things — the first smile, the first roll-over, the first wobbly step, the first half-formed word, the first tantrum. These are the things that I wouldn’t trade all the money in the world for.

The biggest negative is that as a freelancer, my income fluctuates.

PETE: Bummer. So apart from cashflow, what challenges do you face in professional writing while managing a family?

GEORGE: The biggest challenge is find the time to write. Children require a lot of time! My eldest is at school now, but my youngest is still at home. She has a nap in the middle of the day, so there’s a stretch of anywhere between half an hour and two and a half hours every day that I can sit down at the computer to write. She also does one day a week of childcare. So I’ve got from school drop-off until school pick-up to write. Then of course there are evenings and weekends. Sleep? Who needs sleep?

PETE: Sleep? What’s that? So what’s your next/current project?

GEORGE: At the moment I’m working of a set of six educational books about nutrition. They are aimed at grade 2 level, so trying to simplify things like macronutrients and micronutrients and the function of various vitamins and minerals is proving a real challenge. And I’ve been told by the editor that I;m not allowed to use the word “poo”.

PETE: Seriously?

GEORGE: Yep. Try explaining the function of fibre in a healthy diet to a Grade 2 kid without using the word “poo”. My brain is swimming in euphemisms.   I’m also desperately trying to find some time to plan out my next novel. And I’m also still promoting Gamers’ Quest — doing interviews, writing guest blogs and doing book signings.
I always seem to be working on several things at once, these days. I think I’ve developed the skill of multi-tasking as a result of being a father. Although my memory now has trouble recalling all that much from the distant days prior to children, I have a vague feeling that I was only ever capable of one project at a time back then. Being a Dad certainly changes things.

PETE: Hopefully for the better. Thanks mate…

…Okay we’ll leave it there. Great to find a committed Dad writing action-adventure! Gamers’ Quest has a cool promo video which is below. Again, hassle your local bookstore to get a copy in for you. They might buy a few more while they’re at it.

Unique Approaches to Behaviour Management with Children, #28.

My wife told me the story recently of a work colleague who found a way to catch her kids in a lie 10 times out of 10. It seems this lady once watched Pinochio with all three kids and when asked "Will that happen to anyone if they lie?", answered, "Yes."

"Furthermore," she went on, "The only way to stop your nose from growing when you lie is to hold the end of it with your fingers."

From then on, each time she would ask something like "Who broke the vase?", the culprit would always be apparent. They'd be the one with their hand over their nose.

What have you tried that worked like that?