>Tonight I watched a video that my sister put on her Facebook profile. It was a video of my nephew wrestling. Thankfully he won the match. Halfway through the match, I wondered if he was going to win, and I thought, “Please don’t say she uploaded a video of him losing. She wouldn’t do that, would she? Thankfully, no.

This got me thinking that I should upload a few video clips. I found one and spent some time figuring out how to configure it for editing and uploading. I got it done. After doing that, I started scanning through some of the other discs.

I’ve just spent about an hour watching videos from the past three or so years, and I have realized something: I am an angry person when it comes to my kids. I don’t know why, but for some reason I am kind and polite to perfect strangers, but with my own kids I have absolutely no patience for their childishness.

I did not make any new years resolutions this year, but I have decided that I need to make the following changes:

1. I need to spend more time interacting with my kids than I do with strangers. You think you know your kids, but they have an entire existence away from me (at school and other places) that I know nothing about. I get the scary feeling that if I don’t take an interest when they are young, they won’t include me when they get older. I heard a song a while back that affected me, and got me thinking about this one. It’s called “She’ll Go On You” and it’s sung by Josh Turner. The first verse goes like this:

If you’ve got a little girl, you’d better take the time
To go to her tea parties and give her a piggyback ride
Be a dragon or a dinosaur every chance you get
Cause one day you can bet

She’ll go on you
Before you can turn around
And it’s so lonely watchin’ that fast train leavin’ town
Better cherish her every second of your life
Cause this precious little thing that we call time
She’ll go on you

2. I need to be more patient with my kids and not lose my temper. When people ask my kids to describe me in the future, I don’t want them to say, “He was an angry man,” or, “he was mad a lot of the time.” I want them to talk about how they just knew that I loved them by the things that I did, and the way I helped them with their problems.

3. I need to get involved in my kids’ lives. I read something tonight about how women really know their kids, and men know that there are short people living in the house. It is meant as a joke, but there’s some truth there, that shouldn’t be true. I think the most important thing I can do for my kids is to just be there for them. I am naturally a selfish person (most of us are), and I enjoy my “me time,” but I will have plenty of “me time” after the kids move out. This needs to change now. My oldest is almost 12 years old. I want to go back to when he was two, and just enjoy being around him more. You can’t go back, but you can change how much time you invest right now. I’m not wasting any more of their time.

4. A list of resolutions wouldn’t be complete with that American stand-by: I need to lose weight. If a camera adds a few pounds, the video camera shows you in 3D. Am I really this big? I guess I am. A guy online the other day made a comment (he was trying to attack me) about how gluttony is a sin. He’s right.

One last thing: my dog REALLY needs a bath. When it’s warm (March through October), I just leash him to a post on my porch and hose him down, scrubbing him with dog shampoo. When it’s cold (now) I have to take him to Petsmart to have them do it. Right now I don’t have the money to get him washed, but man does he stink.

That is all.