On Dads

In the past week, two friends have had their fathers pass away. It shakes you up to see this happen to people your own age and then think about the similarities in age to your own parents.

At the service for the first gentleman, I was blown away at the things that people had to say about him. He was a pretty amazing man and, as a football coach in his younger days, was able to make an impact in many people's lives. He never really stopped touching people's lives even after coaching either and several people, former players and coaches, as well as simple friends, talked about what kind of man he was.

But it was the incredible moments during which one of his daughters spoke that moved me to tears and gave me a lot to reflect on during my long drive home. The young lady had written a letter to her late father and she read it at the funeral services.

Within a tale of the unconditional love that her father had for her, she pointed out things about his character and about how he taught her life lessons through the way he lived.

I won't go into all the details but I will say that I drove home with a pretty big sense of, what was it? Was it guilt? Fear? Worry? I'm not sure to be exact. But the main thing on my mind was "Am I doing all that I can to be the best father that I can be to my kids?"

And especially for my daughters. I call them out because I feel that, with them, it is the easiest to mess up. Why? Because daughters don't just look to dads for lessons on what kind of behaviors and character to have, they also look to their dads to show them what a "Man" is supposed to be like. Ultimately, how they see me will probably greatly influence the sort of man they look for as they grow into women.

I will admit right here that I don't often intentionally think about how I'm impacting the emotional life of my children. And that's a big (huge) shortcoming and not fair to them at all.

I'm wide open to suggestions and encouragement from those of you that have daughters out there. What have been your successes and failures in this arena? What are you doing there day to day?

The Quest Continues....
Another week and another trip to the scales. From looking back on the week, I feel like I did better this week. There was some "cheating" on the weekend but nothing like before.

I also looked at the LiveStrong data for te week and see that, indeed, I did do better overall for the week.

So, then, I looked at the scale to see what it had to say about the week. It's reply?

238.8

Apparently, the scale is in agreement with the rest. That makes 1.5lbs for the week. I'll take it!

Here's this week's LiveStrong data: Week 10

Photo credit to The U.S. National Archives on flickr.com