Parenting
Made for Greatness: Why the World Needs Strong Men
Rediscovering fatherhood, courage and tenderness as two sides of the same masculine coin. There’s a quiet suspicion floating around our culture that masculinity itself might be the problem. Strength, competitiveness, risk-taking, the instinct to protect and provide – these are treated less like gifts and more like flaws to be managed. We think that’s a…
Read MoreFinding Our Way to Heaven
We’ve been listening to Mike and Alicia Hernon’s podcast called Messy Families. One of their recurring messages for parents is: stop worrying about getting your kids to heaven – parenting is about helping you get there! When we first heard them say this it stopped us in our tracks. Mike and Alicia go on to…
Read MoreSleeping our way to a better marriage
Sleep deprivation is a recognised means of torture. But what about when the cause is one of our children? In this post we explore how we might sleep our way to a better marriage. Our granddaughter is three months old. She is pure delight and we are loving being Nonnina and Nonno. Naturally her parents…
Read MoreOn Trend with Unbusy
Busyness has become a bit of a status symbol in our culture. Yet extreme busyness is not only detrimental to our inner life, it is also toxic to relationships. Some years ago, we enjoyed a week in New Zealand – about five days with some of our children and then two blessed days on our…
Read MoreSpiritual Mothers
It’s no mistake that the modern celebration of Mothers’ Day occurs in May – the month of Mary. Our heavenly mother is the model of motherhood from whom all – men and women alike – take inspiration. We’ve often joked that it takes mere seconds to conceive a child but years of sleeplessness and self-denial…
Read MoreLove in the Waiting
Advent is the season of waiting; we wait in anticipation of the coming of Christ. But are we the only ones doing the waiting? I (Francine) was hurrying to get out the door for 7am Mass. I looked at the time on the car clock and sighed in defeat: 6:58. There was no way…
Read MoreGratitude: Plant Now, Reap Later
As we look forward to the new year, lots of us are making resolutions, setting goals, planning for the coming months. Most of our colleagues in the marriage education field are posting articles about setting relationship goals – an excellent idea, but we’d like to propose something different. It has been well established that gratitude…
Read MoreThe Maybe Baby Conversation
How do couples decide when and how many children to have? The Maybe Baby Conversation can Help. During our engagement, we took lessons in a Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), then known as Natural Family Planning. Wanting to live a Catholic marriage, we accepted the Church’s wisdom and rejected contraception to follow her moral teaching.…
Read MoreAttachment Style and Marriage
Our earliest experiences of love and care profoundly influence what we each bring into our marriage. Attachment Theory illuminates how. As infants, we are completely dependent on our parents for basic physical needs like food and clothing. We also rely on them to provide affection, stimulation and soothing of distress. Research shows that the rapid…
Read More#19 Transition to Parenthood
The transition to parenthood is a challenge for all couples but for a couple that experienced almost a decade of infertility the change from being a married couple with no kids, to parenthood can be a dramatic shift in their identities and relationship. In this podcast Laura and Joseph Cain share their rollercoaster of marriage,…
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