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Fathers And Their Daughters

Fathers And Their Daughters

  • Relationships

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, then a daughter will seem like she’s from another galaxy to her father at times.

Dads, have you ever been in a conversation with your girl and suddenly she seemed to transform into a giant Rubik’s Cube, then your brain began to turn to mush and smoke came out of your ears?

You throw your hands up and beg for your wife’s help.

Sure fatherly love comes naturally but the communication is anything but instinctive. You say tomato, she says “you’re a clueless old fart who has no idea who I am, what makes me tick or what I really want out of life.”

At least that’s how it feels in our heads, right?

What happens if we get these “growing pains” conversations wrong?

If I’m too distant and fatherly, she grows up desperately seeking attention and dating the lead guitarist of an alternative rock band.

If I’m overly affectionate, she destined for a life of disappointing relationships because no man can live up to Daddy.

If I yell or am too strict, she’s painting her nails black and obsessed with taking sepia photographs of abandoned buildings.

If I’m not stern enough and give into every whim of hers, I’ll spend her teen years sitting in a lazy boy by the front door at 1 a.m. texting her feverishly to come home as my hair goes gray.

Where is the balance? There’s no course or handbook for this….or is there?

Learning how to truly express yourself and effectively communicate isn’t just about getting to the top of the company ladder or making new connections, it’s about the everyday conversations that weave the fabric of your life. The type of men that women date and have long-term relationships with are also directly related to the kind of relationship a girl has with her father.

Dr. Linda Nielsen, an expert on father-daughter relationships says fathers generally have as much or more impact as mothers do in the following in terms of their daughters’ achieving academic/career success, creating a loving/trusting relationships with a man and being self-confident and self-reliant.

Good communication isn’t always instinctual, it often it takes practice and a bit of self examination. Don’t let the best and most critical years go by assuming that everything will “work itself out.” Take the steps necessary to develop your communication with your children and watch the difference it makes it both your lives.

Pursue Rich and Meaningful Life Experiences

Pursue Rich and Meaningful Life Experiences

  • BusinessConnectingPersonal DevelopmentRelationshipsUncategorized

In his “For the Love of Money” podcast Chris Harder points out that “everyone has the right to an abundant lifestyle, and the responsibility to help others have the same.”
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Can you confidently say “I want to make more dollars” or has capitalism become a taboo word for you?.
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The record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lives of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.” -Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist. .
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Last year Americans spent a total of $70.15 billion on lottery tickets How’s that working out in fulfilling your dreams?
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Lets face it there are only two things you can do with a paper dollar (1) use it for a fire (2) use it to wipe your rear-end. .
HOWEVER, WHAT DOES THAT DOLLAR REPRESENT?……RICH & MEANINGFUL” life experiences. Like the one in this photo, my wife Angelike’s first trip to Lambeau Field on Thanksgiving Day 2015.   About 35 million people watch on Thanksgiving Day. How many have been to Lambeau to be “in it”?
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So maybe your “Rich & Meaningful” life experience is completely different. Maybe it’s:
Playing golf at Pebble Beach ($525) .
Taking the Fam to Disney World ($6,360 for a family of 4).
Summiting Mount Everest ($45,000).
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Most memories have a price tag💲Not all, I know….Watching your child take their first step is priceless. A great sunset is priceless. Sharing a laugh with a friend is priceless…..But if we’re being realistic and honest, for everything else, there’s Mastercard. .
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I ask you, where would you like to go? What would you like to experience? How will you get there?.

Sometimes the Better Comes After the Worse

Sometimes the Better Comes After the Worse

  • RelationshipsSpouseUncategorized

More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.”
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Words of true wisdom from Doug Larson, who was a columnist and editor for the Door County Advocate and wrote a daily column, “Doug’s Dugout,” for the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
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It was a rough week in the Norrie house with 2 visits to the ER and a whole bunch of fear over a mysterious illness that overcame my wife Angelike.
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While we still don’t have a solid answer for what it is, the good news is that all her tests came back normal.
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We’ve been extremely blessed in life but have also had some major challenges peppered throughout our 7 years of marriage. This week was definitely not the better in terms of those famous vows a couple takes, but it made us all the more grateful for the little things we take for granted.

We prayed with so many friends and those prayers were POWERFUL! And we also recognized through this season that there are other couples we know out there going through a very rough season in life of their own, some minor, some major.
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One thing is for sure, a marriage will never be smooth sailing, it will always be tested. But that’s why it’s great, because it just gets stronger and stronger the more it’s challenged..
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Thank you to those who prayed with us and for us and may God bless all of you who are in the midst of a battle. May he use your LOVE to get you to a “better” place again.

Men are myopic. Women are from Kaleafornia

Men are myopic. Women are from Kaleafornia

  • RelationshipsSpouseUncategorized

 

She has the pair of ideal size jeans to keep her fitness goals in mind.hqdefault

He has a white wife-beater that lets him know when he’s had one six-pack too many.

Copyright STEWART WILLIAMS 07956 568150 SUN FEATURES, Size 14 Jeans Test. Geenay Laubscher 20 from Essex tests the fit of High Street jeans 17/6/16 ZARA

 

She reads books about how to deal with feelings and inner conflict.

He reads books on how to fix things and make powerful presentations.
fort-wayne-s-spa-party-destination-sgsozj-clipart

 

She just wants a spa day getaway to get a facial and pedicure.

He wants just three hours to himself to watch the game uninterrupted.

 

She wants the automatic transmission and the pearl white paint.

He wants the manual 5-speed and matte black finish.

 

The good Lord simply made us different didn’t He….or She?

 

Men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome while women have two copies of the X chromosome. And wouldn’t ya know, the X chromosome carries a bigger instruction manual. Imagine that. And since women have two of them, well, you’re gonna need a bigger instruction manual as well.

 

While we can’t agree on most things, what we can agree on is that we’re better off with one another than without. But how do we, as James Ingram sang it, “make the magic last for more than just one night?”

 

So, for just once, I’m gonna figure out what we’ve been doing wrong.

The Guys

(A) We’re myopic. In fact, you might say we have a one-track mind. It can be downright primal at times. It’s that whole silly “survival of the species” embedded into our DNA I suppose. Pesky, isn’t it? Always getting in the way of what’s really important. Well, we didn’t invent yoga pants, you did, and that really didn’t help at all.

 

(2) We’re not the best conversationalists. Nobody will mistake us for Oprah on a couch that’s for sure. We follow the (Noun-verb- adjective-Noun) format, again from the Cro-Magnon days. “You make pretty woman for me….I hunt delicious animal” and that’s about as far as we go. I can be fairly sure that superlatives, antecedents and reciprocal pronouns were most likely invented by females. The disjunct, (a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in) definitely was.

CavemenWorld is the Internet’s leading resource for Paleo lifestyle information. Nobody knew better how to survive the trials of living than the cavemen. Our Articles and Insights cover the entire gamut of human endeavors from a Stone Age perspective, showing you how to Eat, Move, Explore and Thrive like our cave-dwelling ancestors did, so that you can be just as healthy, strong and full of life as they were.

 

(D) We can be unorganized, perhaps even lacking the attention to detail which you require to exist. You know, when the throw pillows don’t accent the couch just right…the important stuff in life. We have to take some of the blame here guys. We invented plumbing centuries ago, but never thought to make pipes big enough for certain things? Sure, she sheds like German shepherd in the summer leaving fuzzy clumps that could be mistaken for small animals, but it’s always our beard trimming that seem to clog the sink.

 

Now for the LADIES:

 

(1) Your attention to hygiene can be a little over the top. A scrub is somebody who doesn’t live up to his draft position, not a hygiene product. It’s called soap. And it contains…you guessed it, soap. We don’t need avocado and sugar to get our faces and armpits clean. That’s food. And what’s Jojoba? I must’ve heard it a thousand times and still have no idea what it is. All this time I thought it was Cerrano’s voodoo statue from Major League.cerrano1

 

(2) We may be, as my wife calls it, “blissfully unaware”. She claims to be aware of all things at all times. “Like how many diapers are in the diaper bag” I asked? “No” she said, “like if your kids have food to eat that day.” Oh, yea, whoops. I guess this goes back to that DNA. If we got hungry in the dinosaur days, we killed something and ate it, we didn’t have to make reservations two days in advance. But now I have to know how many slices of bread are left in the loaf on any given morning, if there is toilet paper on the rack or when the recycle truck comes? Seems a bit OCD to me.

01-the-rise-of-bitter-foods

(3) This obsession with kale. What gives? A big kale salad. Baked kale snacks. A spinach and kale smoothie. Changing the name of our 31st state to Kaleafornia? When does it stop? A good friend of mine coined the hardy cabbage “your colon’s toothbrush” a name I certainly consider befitting. Last time I gave it a go it cleaned me out faster than a Jimmy Choo sale on Hautelook. I feel kale is like Hillary Clinton’s conscience, nobody even knew it existed until just recently and now it seems we will be forced to swallow it everywhere we turn. BARF!

 

So there ya have it. The differences in the sexes, easily dissected. Enjoy them while they are still around.

Be Your Own Life Preserver

Be Your Own Life Preserver

  • Personal DevelopmentRelationships

You can do it on your own. You know that right?

By it, I mean anything.

Recently I saw a Facebook post of a young man holding up a sign that read “Please hit like. My mom said if I get 500 likes she will quit smoking”

REALLY? I mean I’d love for a person to quit a deadly habit but if Facebook likes are the lynchpin to your lungs turning black or not, you may have bigger problems.

Fact: We all have the same 24 hours to work with.

Fact: What you choose to do with that 24 hours will determine the next 24 and so on. (more…)

Sibling Rivalry Talk

Sibling Rivalry Talk

  • CommunicationRelationships

step_brothers8Everybody remembers when Dale and Brennan asked one another “did we just become best friends?” in the movie Stepbrothers.

We remember Tommy greeting Paul at the door saying, “brothers don’t shake hands, brothers hug” in Tommy Boy.

And who could forget a frustrated Jan Brady complaining “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” in the Brady Bunch.

Literally since the beginning of time there have been sibling rivalries.

(ex. See Cain and Able.)

sibling fightFrom the timeless “frog-in-the-leg” during the teen years to the inebriated insult at the holiday dinner table as adults, so many factors go into the sibling rivalry. There’s the obvious, age, birth order and gender, but what about the less obvious, inherited neuroticism, who got the good genes vs. bad genes and which kid stuck around home long enough to really get the good stuff from mom and dad.

How we all talk to our brothers or sisters is probably more similar than we think, equal parts “I will knock you out” vs. “don’t anybody talk about my sibling or you’ll have to deal with me”.

Am I right?

Whether you’re trading harmless insults at a dysfunctional Thanksgiving or slamming tequila shots at a family wedding, there’s always that one sibling that goes too far and goes off the board with something uncalled for.

And of course for bigger families the alliances between siblings change more often than the Democratic platform. Sister (A) could be your best friend one day and then the target of your aggression the next when you team up with sister (B) to keep everybody in check.

Down the line, everybody gets older and people start getting married. That’s when you get an entirely new dynamic. The brother/sister-in-law is often like the new kid in school, off limits at first until you feel them out but certainly fair game after they put some time in.752ec82455f210c82d562d743f0c930b

Most can relate to the one sibling who does more, leaving the others to throw up their hands and say, “we get it, you’re the perfect one. You’re never wrong and the one who always does everything”. This can be the catalyst to push further into a war of words or can be the point at which everybody cracks up and hugs it out.

Socially speaking, the relationships we have with our siblings will always be the ones we cherish. The blood bond is a strong one. So make sure you never forget that blood is thicker than water.

American humorist Sam Levenson said it best when he wrote “Siblings are children from the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together”

What Language Is My Spouse Speaking??

What Language Is My Spouse Speaking??

  • CommunicationRelationshipsSpouse

Sometimes I feel like it would be easier to do a Chinese Crossword puzzle on a rollercoaster than to understand how men and women communicate with one another.

And although I’ve studied it for more than 30 years, I don’t speak fluent female and I’m not sure I ever will.

Allow me to use a piece of cinematic masterpiece in order to illustrate my point. (more…)

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