Father K'nex with Son

After a busy Sunday afternoon, our family sat down for "Family Meeting." We try to do this every week...just look at the calendar and touch base about ball games, lunch money, and school progress reports. When the "business" was done, Parker casually asked, "Hey dad, do you know where my K'nex stuff went that was down in the basement?" Parker and I had found several bags of pieces but hadn't been able to find the part he had already put together. We had looked for quite a while that afternoon. His dad replied, "Yeah, I took that apart a long time ago."

My first reaction was to laugh, thinking of my husband spending an extra hour painstakinly taking the thing apart piece by piece and putting it in bags so he could store something else on that shelf, instead of just setting the whole thing on the floor. After all, isn't that why we have a large, unfinished storage room? To leave bulky stuff like that sitting around. No wonder it took him so long to clean the basement.

But Parker wasn't laughing. He shot down the hall to his room, angry tears rolling down his face.

My befuddled husband looked around at Hillary and I. "What's wrong with him?"

My husband's logic (that Parker hadn't touched that toy the whole year it had been downstairs) was right, but his tone was wrong. Parker felt betrayed and unimportant. He had spent a long time and a lot of work putting that together, and his dad had uncerimoniously destroyed it without even ASKING!

When I tried to explain that, a conversation ensued that resulted in my trying to get him to see where he went wrong, and him implying that I had raised the kids "my" way, which was obviously the "wrong" way. Finally, in tears, I suggested that he just say something to make Hillary cry and his work would be done for the night!

We did get over it before bedtime. Dad appologized, Parker grudginly forgave, and we all went to bed. And when we woke up this morning...God gave us a snow day!

It was so nice to relax...the four of us tucked into our cozy warm house. As I was stirring the chocolate gravy, I asked Parker, "So you wanna talk about last night?" "Not really," he admitted as he bounced a small ball off the wall just inches above my head. "I wrote Dad last night and he wrote me back." Whew..okay, taken care of. Thank God I instituted that special journal thing a couple of years ago. Just some of that parenting "my" way, I guess.

Anyway...Parker and Dad worked together to rebuild the K'nex Carousel.

They spent hours.

The little boy from next door even got in on the action. Now Dad is really racking up bonus points with me!

So today, all is well. And once again we've proved that no matter what gets destroyed in our family...together we can put the pieces back together.