Read Today’s Blog for a Winning Experience

Here are three things to remember.

1. At the end of the day, win or lose, it is just a game. Yes, we like to win. Yes, we like for our team to win. However, sometimes we, or our team, learn as much if not more from losing than from winning. We don’t like to learn lessons the hard way, but sometimes it is essential for our overall well-being. We may not understand it at the time, but at some point later in life, we likely will. This lesson is oftentimes more important for fans than for those playing the game, especially when children and teens are the ones playing. Too often the fans expect them to play as well as the pros do, and that’s just not going to happen. If you lose, mourn the loss, then get over it and move on.

2. You can’t accomplish much in life without knowing how to read. You don’t have to like reading, but you have to be able to read. As often as not, most information is communicated to us through the written word. We have to be able to understand what we’re reading. Parents who encourage their children not to be successful readers are doing them a huge disservice. I’d go as far as to say that it is a form of negligence. In the year 2013, there is no reason for a healthy child not knowing how to read.

3. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you will repeat them. Experience is the best teacher, and we can learn a lot from the mistakes we make. We learn easier, better ways to accomplish things based on experience. We learn who to trust and who not to trust based on experience. Life can sometimes become a lot more enjoyable if we learn from these experiences. If experience shows us we can’t trust somebody, then it doesn’t matter how much we love or like that person, we need to stop trusting them. You can love someone and not trust them. If experience shows us that eating certain foods is detrimental to our health, we should refrain from eating those foods. If experience shows us that procrastination is more harmful than helpful, then we should stop procrastinating. Experience is the best teacher, but only if we stop to actually learn something from the experience. These experiences and lessons can be both positive and negative; not all things we learn have to be learned through negative experiences. It’s just up to us to make sure whether it’s positive or negative, we get the message.

Almost-Perfect Evenings Don’t Have to Be Trivial

Tonight’s blog will be a bit brief because I’ve been busy having an almost-perfect evening. On a side note, the abounding alliteration in the previous sentence was not intentional. Anyway, the only thing that would’ve made it a perfect evening, rather than an almost-perfect evening, would have been if my daughter had been home. She had to stay at ALC this weekend for choir practice because the Voices of Appalachia will be performing their Christmas concert Sunday evening.

So, what makes an almost-perfect evening? All my boys were here, as were Ashley, Theresa, and Tiffany. By the time Jimmy got home from work, we were in the midst of some serious multi-tasking, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The evening began with making bacon. I had put the bacon in the oven so I wouldn’t have to tend to it quite so much. We needed bacon because I was also going to fix hamburgers, so obviously bacon cheeseburgers are the best way to go with that. Bacon in the oven worked relatively well until I got busy and forgot a pan of it and burned it black as a magic 8 ball. The boys immediately declared that pan would be Jimmy’s. They weren’t doing it to be cruel; Jimmy really does like his bacon best if it is burned. He must have loved that plate of bacon. I don’t think it could’ve been more burnt if I’d tried.

After we ate our bacon cheeseburgers, the boys wanted to play a game. Cody and Tiffany were watching TV, so the rest of us teamed up to play Trivial Pursuit. Byron and Theresa were a team, Travis and Ashley were a team, and until Jimmy came in from work, I was on my own. I must say, I was doing pretty good on my own, even with the multi-tasking. Theresa was helping Ashley study for an art test while we were playing, and I was reading English 100 research papers while we were playing.

The game finally ended when Byron gave Jimmy and me an “easy” question because he had to take Theresa home, and he knew Ashley was tired and wanted to go back to her parents’ house. Of course, with the easy question, we won, and the game ended.

After everyone left, I did put dirty dishes into the sink, but that’s the extent of the kitchen cleanup for tonight since I really needed to get my writing done. All-in-all, it was a nearly-perfect evening, even with a sink of dirty dishes sitting in there. I got to cook for my children, we played a game together, and I have just over a third of the research papers graded.

Perfect, or nearly-perfect evenings don’t have to be extravagant. sometimes simpler is better. And remember, your kids are never too old to play games with.