I blitzed my way through Donald Miller’s latest work of genius To Own a Dragon.  This is not going to be a book review (since I’ve already applauded Mr. Miller’s writing on many occasions).  Instead I just wanted to throw a few of my favorite quotables out there.  I liked these passages on his take on what it’s like to live with a family that has small children.  (If he only knew…)

During the years I lived with the MacMurrays, I discovered children were loud.  In the mornings they rise with the sun and get into the cereal before their parents wake.  Within ten minutes, one of them has stabbed the other with a fork and so you rouse each morning to the sounds of murder.  If you place a pillow over your head or keep a fan running, you can ignore it for ten minutes or so, but sooner or later you have to go downstairs to lock the screaming one in the pantry….

The awful truth about living with a family, however, is you don’t get a lot of sleep.  Unless you can afford a nanny or send your toddler to military school, which is what I intend to do, you are going to get up with the sun.  There is nothing you can do about it. I tried to get around this fact, but after discovering I was using white noise and pillows to ignore the chaos of morning, Chris decided to start climbing the stairs to wake me in person.  He would stand at the front of my bed and stare at me, making me feel I was some kind of animal living in his house.  I would tell him the guilt wasn’t working, that I was a grown man and could sleep as long as I wanted, but he would continue staring, using all sorts of three-year-old tactics he probably learned from a book about how the Chinese do war.

And then there is the upside…

" ‘Elbow. [his nickname for Elle MacMurray] It’s nine in the morning, for crying out loud.  And a Thursday.  Nobody gets up this early on a Thursday.’ She would stop screaming then, only panting, trying to find a breath through the hiccup-like convulsions of tiny toddler lungs.  And with this I would crawl out of bed, lean down to pick her up, and take her downstairs and into the kitchen.  After a few seconds, her panting would quiet to awkward breathing, and she would slip her head into my neck, and then wrap her arms around my shoulders, and of course she had me.

That is the thing with kids, isn’t it? I believe God made them small and cute so we wouldn’t forget to feed them."

And only on rare occasions do I forget to feed mine…but that’s probably because they remind me a hundred times a day like Tibetan monks chanting a mantra, "DaddyIwannasnack, daddyIwannasnack, daddycanihaveasnack…"