"The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away." - Ronald Reagan

This has to be a short post tonight. It's already late and I'm going to be up later.
I got the plantation shutters back up this morning and then headed back to the clinic via Lowe's. I had to use Liquid Nails to attach the transition strip from the carpet to the vinyl tile I installed yesterday because the nails that came with it were pointless against the concrete slab floor. I also repaired some carpet out by the front door and installed a door stop.

Then I left in Josh's F-150 and headed 40 miles east-southeast to Ikea. Came home with a complete bedroom set, including a long 8-drawer dresser, a narrower and taller 3-drawer dresser (guess who gets which), a bed, mattress, box springs and two night stands.

I'm now taking a break from torture assembling all of the above. It needs to be done tonight, early tomorrow at the latest.
See, tomorrow afternoon Bruce & Debbie McGowan are coming. We've known them from our days in Prunedale, back in the late 70's. Very special friends!
And though I know they'd understand, I don't want things all over the place when they arrive. Right now we have our old dressers in the dining room, other stuff from before the demolition out in the garage, and a laundry hamper in the hallway.

I don't mind working late when there's good reason. What I don't like is that I can't help out at that rental I've been working at lately. She came home from work tonight to find the front door kicked open by burglars who apparently robbed her. I wish I could go in tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest to fix the door. (It will probably need to be replaced, jamb and all.)
I'll try to get in there Thurs. morning.

In our adult Foundations class I'm doing a short series on parenting. Some people who read about it here asked if we could post those sessions on our website. We normally just post the message from the worship service but we decided to post the class time too, based on those requests.

I've been getting some interesting feedback from people at Pathway and from people listening online. From this strictly anecdotal evidence it seems like there's a lot of angst out there about parenting. People seriously concerned they're getting it all wrong and at risk of totally screwing up their kids.

I don't remember worrying all that much about it during our parenting years, and I don't remember our friends sweating it too much, either. We just did it. We got some stuff right and some wrong, and we occasionally disagreed with our friends' parenting decisions. But I don't think it was the cause of the kind of stress it seems to be know. This morning Pam and I talked about why.

Probably lots of reasons. Somebody came up with the idea to write a book about ways to get it wrong, the right way to do it, and what would happen if you didn't follow the book's wisdom. (Dr. Spock the first?) This was followed by more and more books with the end result being an atmosphere of insecurity among parents.

I wonder if another factor isn't the shift over the last few decades from a parent-centered home to a child-centered home. When the kids are the most important people in the family they assume a disproportionate weight, and doing the right thing for them is the most important family responsibility. That's a lot of pressure!

I'm thankful the home in which I grew up was not about us. We had no illusions about it; the family centered around my parents. Dad was my mom's primary focus and visa versa. That was good for us, and prepared us for adulthood. We were not then and knew we should not expect to be the center of any universe.

I wonder if that now-less common family structure didn't also take a lot of pressure off moms and dads.

OK, back to work. Gotta get the drawers assembled on the larger of the two dressers.