I love the way that life shapes our kids.  Forget all the parenting crap you ever read, all of the tactics and approaches you try.  In the end, the biggest influence on your kids will be their lives and experiences.  Sure you can hope that the experiences are positive, but even if they aren’t, they can prove to be useful in learning.  A good example would be the fact that we have had a poop composter in our backyard for a couple of years now, the guys are very used to that.  In addition to that, some close friends recently replaced their septic system, so needless to say they have lots of septic-related experience recently.  Sure, not really experience that would really make or break their success maybe, but who knows, it might come in handy someday.

For instance, the other day there was a big windstorm at our place, and it happened to be the night before our garbage pickup day.  As the boys and I were walking to the bus in the morning there was a garbage can lid laying on the grass near the edge of the road at the park next to us, blown off somebody’s garbage can.  Cael noticed it and said “Geez, I never noticed the septic system there before?”  I chuckled, and then Quinn jumped right in with all of the swagger and authority of an older brother and scoffing he said “No Cael, it’s a poop hole.”  I loved the fact that my two kids immediately and unquestioningly believed that this garbage can lid could be either of those two things, and in fact they have had direct experience with both things recently, and both are equally valid possibilities in their world.  It also leads me to take great heart in the fact that I am completely messing with their realities, and that years from now they will both reflect back and say to each other “What the heck was with Dad and those poop holes?  Man, that was messed up.

Yep, happy to be the guy doing this to my kids.