wedding road trip

You Are Who You Raise

I’m going to sound like I’m repeating myself, but once again we went to visit my cousins. (In case you’re wondering, I have seven cousins on my mom’s side of the family, so that’s why they keep cropping up on the Wedding Road Trip.) This one (we’ll call him Josh) lives outside of Boston with his wife Kris, son Alexander, and son-arriving-one-week-before-our-wedding.

Josh is the oldest of the cousins and tends to be ahead of the rest of us with marriage, grad school, and children. I even sort of followed him career-wise (he’s a landscape architect, and I’m an urban planner). I’m happy to travel in his wake, since he’s got a solid relationship with Kris and an amazing child in Alexander.

Josh and Kris shared a lot of sound relationship advice with us, but for the purposes of this blog, let’s talk about raising children. We’ve seen a lot of different arrangements of childraising on this journey, and have no definitive judgments on right or wrong – we’re still learning. But we must say that Alexander seems like an exceptional outcome. He is three years old and the first thing he does when he walks in the house is put away his shoes. I am 34 and still have not learned how to do this. He also built a fort out of paper towel rolls, and then promptly put them all away. According to Josh, Alexander came up with the idea himself and brought all of the recyclable paper towels up from the basement without assistance. We couldn’t figure out exactly how Josh and Kris made this happen, but it might be because they treat him respectfully, sort of like a fellow adult (no, he’s not allowed to drink beer or watch HBO).

Sigh. It would be great to get some of that mojo bottled.

Tags: day 28 boston wedding road trip, marital advice, wedding road trip boston