When Lack of Sleep Meets Teenagers and Transition

It's the last night of the summer for 6 of our kids. It was a meeting for confirmation. It was me being very tired. It was a couple of those teens being particularly obnoxious. It was one kid being her most rude self. It was me not able to keep my mouth shut when it was over.

It was not a good combination.

To have six children in confirmation would not be a fun task for anyone. But to be the pastor's family and have six kids in confirmation is really not fun. There are expectations and requirements and of course, if the pastor's kids can't fulfill them, then nobody should have to.

For those who are wondering, we don't have any intention of making our children believe in God. We attempt to be role models of our faith, we try to talk about it and we try to intentionally involve them in those discussions. We bring things up in our day to day verbally and we attempt to engage our kids in conversations about faith, but it is not our agenda to force them.

However, kids go to church at our house. It is just like some families who choose to require the whole family to attend a siblings sporting events. Or a family that says that you have to be home for dinner a certain number of times a week. Or a family that attends every band performance. It's part of our family culture.

Obviously our kids can run away on weekends. We have three that have done that multiple times. But if they are home they will go and if they make it a huge issue they get consequenced.

So tonight there were consequences... not major ones. But I had to have a tongue lashing for daring to give them. Several choice words threats and unpleasantries were communicated. it was lovely.

Before we left for confirmation, Ricardo and Tony got in a huge fist fight... resulting with me in the middle restraining tony and cuss words flying everywhere.

After confirmation Dominyk got angry with Wilson and started obsessing about him not going to the shower. REsulting in cuss words flying everywhere.

In fact, maybe I should just crown f*** the word of the day at our house.

Transition is never good here. And this is the worst one of the year. I'll be glad when we finally get to tomorrow and things can mellow out some.

but for now, I'm going to try to do something about this lack of sleep problem and head to bed early.

Sorry for the rambling.