What a Blessing to Meet So Many of You This Year!

I am home now for the season—hurray! It was wonderful to meet so many of you around the country, and thanks for your encouragement and for allowing me to share a few of the lessons that I've learned along the way. While speaking recently at a conference, I shared that we need to remember that we are not raising "4th graders" or "8th graders" or 10th graders." We are raising children. We need to help them discover and develop their unique gifts and talents, and their developmental timetable can be very different from those that we read about in child development books. After all, who do you know that has "normal" children or "normal" days? ;-)

Many of the parents in the audience came up to me later and thanked me for pointing out to them that we are not producing robots or identical widgets in an assembly line. We are here to protect, nurture, teach, and assist them in whatever God has in mind for them. Our children have all developed very interesting and very unique interests and talents, all in areas that I knew nothing about! However, that did not slow us down from helping them investigate and learn about these distinct gifts. You can do it too.

Blessings to you and yours,
Amanda B.