The Land of Ozz

I have been considering this for a while and I believe now is the time.  I will begin a series on “The Father’s Mandate” as defined in Chapter Four of Growing Kids God’s Way.  I will be cross posting these articles here and on GrowingKids.org.  Follow me on Twitter to get notified when the posts go live.

No, we have not jumped to the Attachment Parenting camp.  My wife jokingly admitted to co-sleeping with our 15-month old for an hour or so each morning during our recent trip to Washington, D.C.  Josiah was sleeping through the night in a pack-n-play in the same room with our two older boys, but he was waking when I left for work.  Sherry brought him in an had him lay with her for a little more than an hour until it was time for the rest of the gang to get up.  Both she and Josiah were able to easily go back to sleep this way without waking Riley and Caden.

Babywise and Preparation for Parenting are pretty clear on the subject of co-sleeping and we completely agree with the Ezzos on this subject. That said, there might be a night or two when you can safely deviate on the co-sleeping issue with an older kid without messing up all the great nights of sleep you have been given by following the priciples taught in Babywise? An yes, I know that a 15-months old is well out of the ages covered by Babywise but I thought the title would be cute and catchy.

This post is really not about co-sleeping an, but it is about the two big C’s of parenting.  The two big C’s are Context and Characterization.  What is the context of the situation?  Are you characterized by this as a parent?  The context of this situation was pretty obvious in our case.  Sherry was considering the preciousness of others and wanting to allow our older boys to get the amount of sleep they needed.  I am sure this was also the easiest way to get Josiah back to sleep for an hour or so without having a big power struggle.

We are certainly not characterized by having our children sleep in the same room with us even though there have been some (a lot of) occasions where Sherry or I would bunk in the same room with Caden for health and safety reasons.  Caden has got very congested with a cold in the past and he has required frequent suctioning at night to help him avoid aspiration of his secretions.  At four years old Caden still does not swallow at all, not even his own saliva.  If we didn’t help him keep his airway clear then we could have ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.  We ended up in the hospital a few time anyway, but I am sure there would have been many more hospital stays if we had not taken the extra precautions.  Other than those occasions I can probably count the number of times we have slept in the same room with our kids on my fingers. Most of those other occasions happened when we were visiting relatives or friends.

So it is not unheard of for a Babywise mama to co-sleep with a child, but you can be assured that in our family it will only happen on special occasions based on the context of the circumstances.

I got my most recent edition of Dad’s and Mom’s Corner today and found that the Maxwells have added Charleston as a stop on their Southeastern tour this winter.  MrsOzz’s bestest friend, better known in our house as Aunt Addie is th primary contact if you want to come get some encouragement from the Steve and Teri Maxwell from over at Titus2.com on the subject of Homeschooling.

You can see the Maxwell’s full schedule at Titus2.com.  Aunt Addie said I was the first to RSVP for this event.

While I understand the arguments from folks including other Christians for and against how to handle Halloween, the bottom line is this.  Whatever your convictions are, no one has a right to come in and harass you over your decision.  When I get the “what are you going to be/do on Halloween” question I respond with a simple “our family does not participate in Halloween”.  Most folks just say “oh whatever” and move on, but it is often the fellow Christians who rise up at me with a bitter response.  For some reason there are some Christians who seem to be offended that another Christian can act on a different personal conviction.

Explaining convictions to our young children is one of the most difficult things.  Finding a way to say that people who participate in Halloween are not bad and most people are just having fun.  It is hard when you are using the word fun not joining the “fun”.  We tell our kids that Halloween is an activity that we choose not to participate in as a family.  This is just one more way that we build family identity and set ourselves apart from the world.

I want to share a note my wife left on a parenting forum this week concerning this subject:

I have found a good book that we read every year to communicate the spiritual issues of Halloween. It is called Mommy, Why Don’t We Celebrate Halloween? by Linda Winwood. I find it gives enough details about the spiritual side of the holiday without going overboard.

I too have struggled with the balance. As a child, I remember sitting under the kitchen table with all lights turned out (and of course not a word was spoken)! Those kind of actions left me fearful of the holiday and in a sense elevated evil’s power over the power and authority of Jesus. I rebelled when I was older and indeed participated fully in celebrating Halloween. My moral warehouse wasn’t being filled with any reason WHY! I had no idea why we were sitting in the dark except the explanation that “Halloween is the Devil’s holiday.” This was hard to understand when on the outside nothing looked “evil” in fact it looked pretty fun!

A couple of years after my oldest child was born I felt my heart being pulled away from participating in the holiday though it wasn’t until a year later that I learned the origins of many of the rituals of Halloween. Even with that being said, we are very careful to include our own fun. Building a strong sense of family identity makes the perfect opportunity to bring balance to this holiday. There are many things we do or don’t do because of our convictions based on the Word of God. Our children already know (and Riley will tell you) “We’re the Osborne family and we do/don’t do _________” and they know why we do or don’t do things.

The balance? I think that comes in creating our own fun as a family! We’ve had a family movie night on Mom and Dad’s bed before with popcorn and candy. This year we are looking forward to games, movie and sleeping in the living room (which is on the back side of the house !) We’ll put up a little tent in the living room and we have a huge cardboard box to imagine with. We’ve been saving that box knowing how much fun they’ll have!! I wonder how much sleep we’ll all receive….?!

Have a blessed Fall season!
Sherry for The Osbornes

For those Christians who are led to ignore Halloween or find other alternatives, God bless you, you are not alone even though it may seem so on some days even within your own church family.  For those who are led to minister to people during this time of year or just have a good time dressing up and collecting candy, God bless you.  You are not judged by our family either way.  You are viewed as folks with different convictions.

Previous posts on the subject of Halloween:

Halloween II – Why Christians should not celebrate
Halloween – Should Christians Participate?

A story released today by The Time and Democrat shows that the SC State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex (D) is baking the public school SAT scores and using private and home school success as the yeast in his recipe.  The story titled Honest is foundation of improvement by Randy Page states that Jim Rex fails to mention that the reported two point improvement in 2008 SC SAT scores over 2007 is based on private and independent scores shoring up the average.  The public school scores in SC actually dropped by three points when you look at public schools only.   Here is how the score stacked up in SC for 2008:

2008 SAT scores in South Carolina

Type School       AVG Score*

Public School          980

Private School       1043

Home School         1088

*These scores do not include the new writing section of the SAT.

One observation I took away from this article is that SC is already spending over $11k per student which is more money per student than any of its neighbor states, yet SC is trailing in results. The home schooler are barely mentioned in this article, but at least they shine as the class act with the highest SAT scores mentioned in the article.  I have more to say on education as a whole as it relates to the upcoming election, but I will save that for a separate post on another day.

The President and CEO of Nelson Publishers Michael Hyatt has posted some observations on the lack of modesty in the world today.  Mrs Ozz and I took Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo’s Reflections of Moral Innocence class a few years ago that helped us gain a perspective on how to lead our children down a pure path.  And yes we have all boys and they need to be taught about modesty too.  Now we teach the Reflections of Moral Innocence classes in our home as a follow on to Growing Kids God’s Way so we can help educate other parents on modesty and sex education.

What are the benefits of teaching parents about modesty and sex education?

• No one can do the job better than properly trained parents, for they are the only ones who have the right to determine what value system is placed into the hearts of their children.
• By training parents it puts the responsibility for this education back where it belongs.
• It reduces moral intrusion into the family structure since the value system of the family is not violated by a secular interest.
• It avoids forcing the institutional morality on family and child such as is represented in various public pro-homosexual curriculums.
• It can be done under the best conditions since parents pick the time and place for its implementation, rather than resorting to a group classroom setting.
• It is more cost effective. As pointed out by Josh McDowell in The Myth of Sex Education, the more money spent per capita on sex education of children the higher the percentage of sexual activity. Expensive public programs are not effective.

Thanks to Shawn Wood for leading me to this post by M. Hyatt.

We recently went through the task of rearranging car seats for our kids. Riley is moving into a booster and Josiah has out grown the infant car seat (carrier). We have a fairly nice Britax that we got when Riley was less than a year old. It is in good condition and has never been in a vehicle when an accident occurred. The seat is nearly six yeas old and I was wondering whether or not the seat is still usable despite its appearance. I have heard that car seats expire. Is this a true statement?

I probably would not have even given this a thought but rather let common sense dictate whether or not to replace a car seat. But, sometime last spring we had a fire rescue team at our church one Sunday afternoon doing inspections on the installation of our car seats for anyone who wanted to participate. Ours were all installed and being used correctly, but the technician did give me a little feedback that I found interesting. One of the things he told me was that Riley’s Britax seat was expired. “DO WHAT?,” was my reply. This guy proceeds to tell me that car seats expire after five years. Don’t get me wrong. I get the concept. These things are made of mostly plastic and plastics can become weak when it gets pushed and pulled on enough. The belts can become weak when they get enough acidic spit up, juices, and other foreign substances on them over the years. All that said, you would think that the manufacture would have this plastered all over the boxes that these things come in. After all, that would equate to a fresh sell ever five years. Anyway, I heard what the guy said and went on about my business since this just did not seem to make sense to me. How can you you pick a number and say that in X number of years a car seat will expire? In my opinion you can’t.

Here’s the thing about those expirations. There is currently no federal law requiring that child safety seats have an expiration date. I have also found no state laws referring specifically to expiration dates. If you find that a seat has an expiration on it, you are not likely to get put into jail for using it past its expiration date, but you should certainly contact the manufacture to make sure you understand why they put that date on the seat. A report from AAA says that you are required by most state laws to “use seats in accordance with manufacturer’s instructions.”

Yes, some seats have expiration dates on them? Why? The explanations vary. Maybe the seat nmaufactures are trying to ride the wave of fear created by the technicians who tell us that the seats to expire. Many “convertible” car seats are sold touting that they can be used for 5-35 lbs rear facing and from 20-50 lbs forward facing. Those seats would need to be replaced before one child outgrew them if they were to expire in five or six years. For instance, the average boy will reach 20 lbs between 8-9 months of age based on the CDC Clinical Growth Charts that most of our pediatricians use. That same average boy will reach 50 lbs at about 7 years of age. That means that the average male child would be required to get a new seat before reaching the maximum allowed weight for most convertible seats simply due to an expiration.

The bottom line is that opinions rather than facts seem to be driving the five or six year expiration dates. The expiration age varies depending on who you talk to. Some Child Passenger Safety Technicians claim to have been taught that seats expire after five or six years depending on who trained them. One organization that offers certification classes for these technicians says, “Make sure the safety seat is less than 10 years old (preferably less than five), the expiration date stamped on the plastic has not passed, and it has never been used in a crash.” Reference

This little guy is a handful of joy.

This is a picture of me holding Josiah the latest addition to our family. Josiah is six weeks old today.  He is as beautiful in person as he is in the pictures.

You can read more about all of my three sons on Caden’s Page.

The Growing Kids God’s Way Student Workbook has a new look.  The look and feel of the book is where the change ends.  The principles of Growing Kids God’s Way are exactly the same.  You can read the full details about this awesome new edition of the Growing Kids God’s Way Student Workbook at GrowingKids.org.