Leading & Loving Your Family
“The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them. They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” -Jim Henson
Growth and development should be a part of the human experience. It should be a part of how we go through life. The stages that we go through should push us to continue to become better people. However, I’m not sure what the stage of growth is, where the things that are yours no longer become yours.
Has your state opened back up? I live in Michigan and there are different parts of the state that are beginning to open. I have to admit it, there is a part of me that is excited about being able to do things again, but there is also a part that is cautious about taking my children out. I think that there is a natural part of this. We’ve been quarantined for so long that just getting back to some normal things that we used to do is going to take time.
The second half of the year is going to be interesting. What will you do? Are there events that you want to make up for? Missed birthdays, events, and get-togethers will be prevalent. It could be a rush to try and get everything in that we missed in this second half of 2020.
How will you plan the second half of this year? For me, the biggest couple of things that I want to do with the rest of this year is to take a family vacation and then plan something for my anniversary.
This is something that my wife and I are currently discussing. It’s a balancing act that we’re working on. There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to planning trips for the second half of the year.
This has to do with your comfort on a number of different levels. If you spend any amount of time on social media you will see people all over the place on coronavirus and whether or not they should wear a mask. When it comes to taking your family out and planning a vacation, you have to know what your level of comfort is.
After you know how comfortable you are, you then have to know what’s open and how they are operating. For example, we were planning on having a day for our kids and taking them to a Legoland that was about an hour or so away. They had discounted tickets because they just opened back up. The problem, it’s basically reservation only now and it was going to be mid-September before we could get in.
If you’ve gone back to work it can seem like everyone is going to take their vacations all at the same time. It’s a balancing act that a lot of businesses are having to do. Starting the business back, getting revenue-generating again, needing workers to use some vacation time, but also need people to work. There are a lot of aspects to business and people going back to work.
What are you planning for the second half of the year?
Having difficult conversations can be challenging, especially when we’ve never had them before. We can tend to avoid situations that challenge our growth in certain areas. The parts of our lives that are hard are that way because we have developed a habit of avoidance.
The protest that have been happening around the world are showing us that we need to have difficult conversations concerning race.
As I reflect on why we’ve avoided these difficult conversations, I realized that I’ve avoided difficult conversations in my life. Trying to sidestep those conversations has caused me to become stagnant in my life. While this realization may have started because of racism, I’ve seen how I avoided difficult things throughout my life.
