toddcast

Have you ever bought one of those pieces of furniture that come in a box?   It looks great on the showroom floor and even though the display clearly indicates "some" assembly required you are not fazed by the challenge - until it arrives.   You open up the box and out comes about a bazillion pieces!   The instructions are in eighteen languages and printed so small that you can barely make them out.   Of course, the instructions come with helpful diagrams about as useful as some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic accompanied by the suggestion "two people required for assembly."   Now we men read that as "two people required if you are a wimp -- a real man can do it all by himself." When it comes to putting these things together, here's my experience from early on in my marriage.   To "you know where" with the warnings -- I would try to do it on my own.   This normally meant that I would put pieces together wrong and have to take it apart ...

Back when my daughters were young it would not be uncommon for them to present me with   a little creation of their own as a gift for their daddy.   A page out of their coloring book or a hastily made craft project where some of their favorites, but I'll never forget a particular gift they gave me many years ago. We used to live on a street that dead-ended into a field that in the springtime would bloom with all sorts of weeds, some of which would be quite colorful.   Among them were dandelions.   The girls would play out in the field and one day they came in announcing they had a surprise for me.   From behind their backs they revealed a bouquet of "beautiful flowers" they had picked for me from the field and presented them to me as if they were the rarest and most beautiful flowers known to man.    And to me they were! In actuality they had handed me a bunch of weeds that probably wouldn't last through the day, but because of their l...