Husband in training

A while back (I think before Harper was born) we had a guest preacher at church who said something that has stuck with me.  He said our society is set up around training kids for college, and ultimately careers, but we do a terrible job training them for marriage.  An institution they will be involved in for a lot longer than any company they will ever work for (hopefully).  As Jason and I just celebrated 12 years of marriage, this subject has been on my mind.  The longer I am married, the more committed I am to staying married (and happily so) forever.  And I want my children to want to get married. 

I realized not too long ago that the best thing that could have ever happened to prepare our kids for marriage was having opposite sex children.  I'm not dogging those who have two of the same sex, but when you have one of each, it for sure changes the dynamics of your home.  Garrett and Harper will not find living with their mate to be unusual (as it was for me) because they will have grown up with the opposite gender.

My kids had an interaction today that proved that the last almost 4 years of living with Harper is indeed training him to be a good husband.  Let me set the scene for you.  Garrett had talked her into playing hockey on our ancient Play Station (that our children are horribly deprived because we are the only people on the planet who don't have a Wii is a subject for a different post!), but first she had to go upstairs to get her babies (it was time for a feeding).  I was upstairs changing my clothes (to go to the gym, if you can believe it) and she stopped in the bathroom for a quick consult on feeding technique.  Apparently, when getting her babies she decided it was also time for a little lip gloss.  After showing me her baby, she wanted me to admire and smell her lip gloss.  All during this time, Garrett was hollering from downstairs that he was ready to start the game.  She did a fantastic job of selective listening and didn't answer him until I insisted that she did.  By this time, he had decided to come upstairs to identify the hold-up.  He comes into our room to get Harper, talking all about how the game is ready to go, he's going to start without her, blah, blah, blah.  She looks him straight in the eye and explains that she had to feed her babies first and requests that he smell her lip gloss. And here comes the good part.

Sweet big brother puts his arm on her upper back, leans in for a quick whiff, exclaims "Oh, that's nice!" and gently steers her down the steps to the waiting video game.  Harper willingly follows and they play.

What struck me most about this was that when I had earlier been asked to smell her lip gloss, I couldn't smell a thing, so I'm betting when Garrett leaned down and sniffed, he didn't smell anything either.  But instead of arguing for 5 minutes about how her lip gloss doesn't smell, he told her what she wanted to hear and got her to do what he wanted her to do.

He already has brilliant insight into the female mind.  I hope his wife appreciates all the training he will have received at the hands of Miss Harper by the time he takes a wife!