I triple love dare you!

For my birthday in December, one of my gifts from my husband was the book The Love Dare.  Nothing says "Happy Birthday" like a book that encourages you to work on your marriage. It should come with a post it note attached that says "Hint! Hint!"

Seriously, I appreciated the thought -- that closeness and communication in the middle of really busy lives is a good thing.

We started the Love Dare yesterday.  So now it's "day two" and I have to say that I'm patting myself on the back a little bit because I feel like I'm acing the Love Dare challenge. Day 1 focused on patience. I think typically I don't have serious problems with this in my marriage. I don't regularly explode at my husband or freak out at him about stuff.  Day 2 (today) is about kindness. There were a few illustrations of what kindness 'looks like' in a marriage, and what unkindness looks like. Again, I feel pretty good about where we are.  I supposed eventually the "dare" will get harder.

In the meantime, I got kind of a slap in the face yesterday when I realized that I probably should be Love Daring my kids instead of my husband.  I am not nearly as patient with my kids as I am with my husband. I'm ashamed to admit that is true. I am much more likely to lose my patience with them, to forget that they are just young children, to expect unrealistic things from them.

So I've decided I'm doing a triple love dare, at least when the dares are kid appropriate.  Closeness and communication family wide is a good thing to work towards, even when it means being patient while my kids destroy the house playing "dolphin swims" in the living room, or when Little Man is still refusing to poop in the potty even though he is 4 years old.