Who couldn’t use a little more family unity?
We started early- and what fun we had!
We frequently vacationed in central Oregon in the summertime because Linda is from Salem, OR. During one such vacation, we let each child pick the color and logo for their own shirt, and then we had Crawdad and their birth-order number printed under that name on the back. Many years later, even our treasured golden retriever became Crawdad 7.
Back home in southern California, Jim would make a random announcement from time to time early on a Saturday morning yelling throughout the house, “It’s a Crawdad-shirt day!” The kids would run around like crazy to find their own shirt and partake in this fun ritual that we had as a family. We made sure to have a fun event planned to coincide with wearing the shirts together that day.
Family unity is far more than just sharing shirts together, but it can certainly start there. One thing is for sure…family unity begins with Mom and Dad.
In later years, high school and beyond, a number of our kids’ friends petitioned to add themselves to the Crawdad sequence. Much of it was in good fun of course, but in most cases, there were hard memories and broken families involved too. Rarely do we recognize the true value of something in life unless it is unattainable or until it has somehow been lost.
Our kids were certainly not perfect. If anyone had told me, however, that it was possible to have 3 sons through high school and into college who could share one car between them without any rough edges showing up and without any parental involvement required, I would have been extremely dubious. All of the boys played high school sports and had part-time jobs, plus a myriad of other teenager comings and goings; they worked out all of the car-sharing on their own. This was not the case with my brothers and me when we were growing up! Linda and I give all of the credit to the biblical truths that our kids assimilated through our family meetings and the principles we write about on this website. We could have bought an additional car (or even two) to alleviate needing to share a car, but we purposely chose not to do that. In a similar way, although each child had a PC to do their homework on, they were only allowed to play games on the one machine located in our gameroom– and they had to share then too. Sometimes, more is actually less, for without these purposeful plans by dear old Mom and Dad, our children would have never learned to share among themselves like they have.
There is no child on the planet that wants anything but a united and all-together family!
