Building Bridges With My Boys

For September, my focus will be building bridges with my boys. In other words, I want to work on building a stronger relationship with each of them. Clearly, this is a good thing, but what does it mean practically?

Practically, it means I need to try and spend a little bit of time with each of my boys each day, whenever possible. Today it will not be possible to spend any time really with my two older boys. They are off with my husband today--my husband works about 2.5 hours away, and that is where Ty and Luke's scout troop is. Long story short: we own a house in the Raleigh area; my husband got a job after graduating from NC State with his PhD; we put our house on the market and moved closer to where he works (renting). After a year, our house still hadn't sold, and we were running out of money to pay for both rent and a mortgage, so we made the not-so-fun choice to move back to the house we owned. My husband would commute; we'd still keep the house up for sale, and if it sold, we'd move back down near to where my husband's work is. To avoid disrupting the lives of our kids too much, we opted to keep them with their scout troops, since our last move nearly cost Ty his Arrow of Light, which anyone who knows anything about scouts will know that's a fairly important achievement for those getting ready to move from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. Different troops do different things at different times, so changing troops created some overlap and gaps for Ty. But, that means, Ty and Luke will be hanging with their Dad today, and he will take them to Scouts tonight. They will probably not be home until really late tonight. We homeschool, so I'm thankful that our schedule is flexible enough to allow them Tuesdays off to travel like that, and then sleep in on Wednesdays since they get home so late.

Believe it or not, that was the short version of the story. XD Back on track... Things I can do to work on my relationship with my boys is 1) spend a little bit of time with them every day outside of school time, 2) set aside longer periods of time where I spend time doing things each boy enjoys, and 3) paying attention to them when they want my attention even if it's not especially convenient for me. Let's see how this goes with this first week.