Making the Most of Ordinary Days, Part 2

Dr. James Dobson: You're listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am James Dobson and I'm so pleased that you've joined us today.
Roger Marsh: Well, welcome once again to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh and on today's program, we're revisiting a treasured conversation featuring Dr. James Dobson, his wife Shirley Dobson, and their dear friend Gloria Gaither. Back in the early 1980s, these two women wrote a beloved book together called Let's Make a Memory. 22 years later, they teamed up again for a new offering called Making Ordinary Days Extraordinary. Their message is a timeless one for busy parents: that the small, simple moments with our children often become the ones that matter the most. So sit back and listen now, even if your day's been rather hectic up to this point. You'll hear Dr. Dobson talking with Shirley Dobson and Gloria Gaither about making the most of ordinary days right now on Family Talk.
Shirley Dobson: Jim, the point in this book is that parents are frantic today to get everything done. Bosses expect more out of their employees now and the pace of living is so much faster. The whole point of us doing this book was to make simple things. Parents don't have time to sit around and think of something creative, so all they have to do is flip through this book. There will be a very simple idea that doesn't cost anything that will make a memory in their family that will last a lifetime.
Dr. James Dobson: Gloria, what are some of your favorite suggestions within the book?
Gloria Gaither: Probably the all-time big winner in our family over all these years, and now with my grandkids, is the cornstarch clay. It has been whipped up in all kinds of places: on vacation, in rented cottages, out at our log cabin, at home in my kitchen. It's a combination—and the recipe is in this book—of cornstarch and soda, which you always have around the house. You can divide it in parts, put food coloring in it, or you can use cookie cutters. You can roll it out like dough, you can shape hangers, and you can poke holes in these if you want to make flat ornaments. You can put them in the oven real quick and dry them out. We have done everything under the sun with cornstarch clay.
Dr. James Dobson: The kids like making the clay, too.
Gloria Gaither: They do. By the time they're two, I've got them up on a stool helping to stir the clay at the stove with my arms around them so they don't get hurt. We used to save baby food jars and do a collection of what we called soil diaries. I would pack a bunch of baby food jars in my bag and wherever we went, we've got red soil from Georgia, white sand from Florida. Here they all are lined up. We put little gingham tops and tied ribbons around the tops of the jars when we got home. They all have little labels and even now, there's all these pretty little jars and all these pieces of soil that we brought home from all over the world.
Dr. James Dobson: What I hear you saying, Gloria, is that especially with regard to your grandkids now, you prepare for those visits. Whether they are vacations or whether they come to your house, you have thought through something for these kids to do that will make a memory.
Gloria Gaither: I keep this stuff in case. A lot of times they happen on the spur of the moment, but they always know that at Grandma's house, there's going to be stuff. There always is stuff to do.
Dr. James Dobson: Shirley, you used to have tea parties with Denae and she absolutely loved them. Describe them.
Shirley Dobson: When she was about four years of age, we'd take all of her stuffed animals and we'd put them on a little table in her bedroom with four little chairs. We'd put the mouse and the bear and the rabbit in these chairs. Then I would take out my fine china cups—breakable saucers—and I would make the tea and we'd have a little tea party. It was a way of teaching manners to her, but also it's a sweet memory and she remembers it to this day.
Dr. James Dobson: How to set a table. I also enjoyed doing something with Ryan. He was really heavily into guns and he had all of his toy guns. We would take his little guns and I would put his stuffed animals all over the house. We'd turn out all the lights and come around with a flashlight and look for big game. We'd go big game hunting and he loved that. A simple little thing, like you said, Gloria. It doesn't have to cost much. It can be very simple, but kids at three or four or five years of age love those things.
Gloria Gaither: Bill's favorite thing is camping out under the dining room table, which is about as much roughing it as he can take, actually. He loves to put a great big blanket over the whole huge dining room table and then they get peanut butter sandwiches and crawl in under there. The kids all bring their toys and they camp out under the dining room table. Then the kids are begging Grandpa to have a camp out under the dining room table. Dads are very important in this process. They may think up different things to do with the kids than the moms might. Bill's always coming in from the yard to the back porch where the kids are sitting or playing and making some strange noise. He has gotten from that some really unusual nicknames like "Uncle Moose" and whatever animal he's trying to be. He makes funny noises, especially at night, so that the kids are half scared and half know that it's got to be Papaw. It's very important, I think. Play is how children learn. It's their work, so we should take play seriously.
Shirley Dobson: Another idea in the book for single dads I think would be fun is Hop-Along the Penny Trail. That's where you take a penny and you take your kids out and you have the youngest one flip it first: heads or tails. Tails, you go left. You can say we're going to go a block or two blocks this way. When you get to the end of the two blocks, you give another child and have them flip it again, and if it's heads, they go right. It takes them all over the city. Then you look for things, like "let's find the coolest car" or "let's find the cutest pet." Then you come home and talk about the things that you saw on this unscheduled little walk.
Dr. James Dobson: Denae and I used to look for Volkswagens. She would try to see the Volkswagen before I did and we would count them when she was three or four or five years of age. She loved that game, too. I also used to take Denae on Saturday to the local school and play in the sand pile with her. She loved it when her dad played in the sand pile. I would make castles and I taught her what a moat was and what a drawbridge was. She still talks about that today. She was five years old and she still talks about it.
Shirley Dobson: Again, we hope that our listeners enjoy this book. We hope they'll implement it.
Dr. James Dobson: Gloria, the title of the book is Making Ordinary Days Extraordinary. What makes a day extraordinary? Is it just activity? What is it that makes it special?
Gloria Gaither: You make it special. What we're talking about is a parent's gift of themselves, and that's always translated for kids in time: in doing something together where they're focused in on them. Whether it's a game that you bought but you stop and play it with them, what they really need is you. I know they're begging for $100 tennis shoes, but what they really want is you.
Shirley Dobson: My hairdresser, I was talking to him about this book and he said, "I'm so busy. I get home late, I'm tired. How do you implement these ideas?" One thing you can do is you have to put it on the calendar. It's not going to happen. Pick one day in the weekend of that month that you're going to do something as a family, that you're going to make that an extraordinary Sunday.
Gloria Gaither: I guess I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person and Shirley's a better planner than I am by far. But one of the things that I love in this book is spontaneous walks that happen with kids. A walk doesn't take any planning at all. You get the dishes done and the sun's not quite down yet and you go for it. I always grab a lunch bag. I keep a bunch of lunch bags in the pantry and we each take one and find treasures on the way. When we come back, we do things with them. One of the things is pretty soon we'll be having the leaves starting to turn on the trees. We collect bright-colored leaves and we come home and take the iron and press them between two sheets of wax paper and then trim them any way we want, poke holes in them, and hang them. I have a sidelight to our back door and we hang them. I have permanent nails up there above the sidelight where we can hang things and we make stained glass. Things like that that don't take a lot of planning fit my kind of life better because I've had to find that home is portable. I've raised kids in dressing rooms, in basketball arenas, and I've raised kids on buses and in motels. If it can't be done without planning, it probably doesn't get done in my life. My life has just been crazy, but I really do keep a craft bag packed so that I can do these things. I loved what Shirley just said about planning, however. We blocked out a week to have a vacation at home. Bill and I told our secretaries, "Do not book us anything that week. We want to stay home and we do not want to be interrupted." We all did a family vacation at home. Our house is fun enough and our yard is fun enough, and we can take the paddle boat and go fish on the creek. But the thing is, stuff happens. It gets nickeled and dimed into lunches and can you have breakfast with this person and could you do this one meeting at 2:00? Sometimes you just have to get real intentional about it.
Dr. James Dobson: What you're saying, Gloria, is that you really can't use the excuse of being busy. You can find a way to do this if it's important to you. You find a way to do it.
Gloria Gaither: You just have to care about it.
Dr. James Dobson: You find a time for it if it's really that important. Shirley, do you remember the night that you made Chinese food with Ryan?
Shirley Dobson: He came home from school one day and he said, "Mom, I know cooking Chinese food is a lot of work, but if you'll cook Chinese food tonight, I'll help you. I'll go to the market with you, we'll get the vegetables, and I'll help you cut them up." I said, "Okay, Ryan." So we did that. We spent quite a bit of time together chopping up all these vegetables and we had a really good time and a lot of good conversation. So we had this wonderful Chinese meal. If you remember, you came home from work and we ate until we thought we couldn't hold another bite. Then I turned to Jim and I said, "Boy, I'm sure glad this isn't the night we're invited to Fu-Kong Lee's house." Jim said, "Shirley, I think this is the night." I said, "You've got to be kidding." We ran to the calendar and sure enough, it was that night and we were 30 minutes late. So we called them on the phone and we said we got tied up but we're on our way. So we went over to Fu-Kong Lee's house and she had cooked a nine-course Chinese dinner and invited other people to come. So anyway, we politely took a little bit of everything.
Dr. James Dobson: She'd say, "Want some more?" whatever it was, and I would say, "No, thank you, I'm really full." Then she would spoon it onto my plate and we just sat there and ate. We should have told them. We should have just been honest. We were a year later, but we faked it and I've never been so full. I didn't even think I could walk out of that house that night.
Gloria Gaither: Another story about food before we forget this topic. I have this raspberry cake I have made ever since our kids were tiny. Everybody loves it. There has never been one single crumb left to have the next day. It is always gone, so every birthday we have raspberry cake. This was a funny emotional moment when they cut Susanne's wedding cake and they took out the first piece and there was this bright raspberry-colored cake. It wasted us all. We thought, "She's got raspberry cake for her wedding!" That was such a beautiful salute to a family memory that we had all done as a family since she was a tiny little girl. It started because she has a birthday on the 15th of December and I made up my mind that it wasn't going to get mixed up with Christmas. So we never used Christmas wrapping for her birthday presents and I wanted to have something that wasn't Christmassy for her birthday. That's how the raspberry cake started. So when she in this June wedding cut the cake and it was her birthday, it was like a wonderful way to say, "Thank you, Mom, for making my day always special." And it was also that she had loved it so much she wanted to share it with so many people.
Dr. James Dobson: Did you cry? I bet you cried.
Shirley Dobson: Now, Gloria, you know everybody in radioland's going to want your raspberry cake recipe.
Dr. James Dobson: We're coming down to the end of the second program here and I would like to just try to put into words the way I feel about this book and this project because we're at the stage of our lives where that activity with children—at least our children—is a memory. We made a wonderful memory with them. As we look back on it, it is the warmest experience in my life to have had that privilege of raising two human beings and teaching them about God and introducing them to His principles and helping them learn to carry His responsibility and reaching out to others and all those things that we tried to do. Taking them to church—there were times when I had been out speaking the whole week and I came home so worn out that I could hardly crawl into bed. We got up on Sunday morning and we took those kids to church because that's what we did. It's paid off and those kids are grown now and they love the Lord. As I look back on it, there is not one single memory that I can add to that legacy. It's all in the book. Everything is done. I can't go back and change one thing. There were days when we didn't do it right. We've given examples here of when we did things right. It didn't always go that way. There were times when we were simply too tired, too busy. There were too many demands and I regret it today. What in the world was I doing that was more important than that—to make time for those little kids when they were small and even in the teen years when they didn't need us quite as much?
Gloria Gaither: You've said a really vital thing just then because I think we tend to think we need to do this because the kids need it. I've got to find time to do this because the kids need it. The truth is, we need to find time because we need it, too. When we look back at our lives, the things we did with the kids will be some of the most important days and important moments of our whole life—not that the kids needed it, we needed it. Kids give us perspective and they put things back right. Kids know what's eternal and they'll tell us if we listen.
Dr. James Dobson: You have five grandchildren. Grandparenting is a little different than parenting, and yet, it is so important, isn't it? You can make a contribution to those kids there that really can't be made by parents in the hubbub of everyday living.
Gloria Gaither: It's a lot of fun. I think they think you know everything and you are a bottomless resource of everything they need: wisdom, stuff to do, fun. Grandma can fix it, whatever it is. I heard someone say a long time ago that the generation gap is only between succeeding generations. I think that's really true. I think there is seldom a generation gap between children and their grandparents because you by then are smart enough to become a kid again.
Dr. James Dobson: That's what it takes, doesn't it? You get out on your hands and knees with those kids. You were talking about cornstarch clay.
Gloria Gaither: I got inline skates for my birthday. Inline! I've got to see that. That I have to see.
Dr. James Dobson: We love bicycles, didn't we, Shirl? Speaking of how tired you were, I remember that Sunday that you'd been on a trip and you'd come home and you really needed to rest, but you took Denae out on a bike ride in the afternoon. Of course, it didn't turn out as well as we'd hoped because her foot got stuck in the spokes and both of you went head over heels on the pavement. In fact, Gloria, that story is in your book, What My Parents Did Right. Denae shared that. She was only two years old and she stuck her foot into the spoke. She was sitting on a bar in front of me and the two of us went head over heels and landed in the street. I cuddled her up in my arms and ran to the house crying myself—both of us were crying—and took care of her and nursed her. Fortunately, her foot was not broken, but it was sure sprained. I just remember it as an unbelievably very warm time, even though it was a very painful time.
Shirley Dobson: I would just like to add to what Gloria said, that when you come to the end of your life and you look back, it won't be the plaques on the wall or the achievements or, in your case, Jim, the books that you've sold that you'll remember. It's really who loved you and who you loved and what you did in the service of the Lord. Those are the things that are going to count.
Dr. James Dobson: Everything else is wood, hay, and stubble. Gloria, any last thing to the parents who are out there about this book?
Gloria Gaither: I just would say two words: think forever. There will be a lot of voices calling for your attention. At the end of the day, you're going to be tired and your back will ache, and you will sometimes lie there in bed and say, "What made me so tired?" Trust me, if you can come up with one or two things that will live forever, you've done a good day. Bill and I wrote a song, "We Have This Moment to Hold in Our Hands." The lyrics are: "We have this moment to hold in our hands and to touch as it slips through our fingers like sand. Yesterday's gone, tomorrow may never come, but we have this moment today." I just would really like to urge you to let yourself be interrupted. I really would like to repeat what I said about kids know what's eternal. When they're pulling on you, sometimes they are telling you something really important. I remember one time Benjie caught me in the middle of—it's a long story and I'll make it real short—but it was one of those days, and Shirley knows what I mean by one of those days. We had supper late and I was exasperated and I was not in a good mood and nobody else was. Dinner was a disaster and the phone rang and I was disgusted at Bill because he kept getting up to answer it instead of letting it ring. Finally, everybody got out of my way and I'm unloading the dishwasher and I'm slamming the dish towel and I'm thinking, "Now I've still have all this other stuff to do and I've got to do a load of wash and everybody's deserted me and I need to clean up the kitchen all by myself." I was having a big pity party. This little guy came down across our living room and into the dining room and into the kitchen where I was. He said, "Come out here, Mommy." So I started, "I can't, I'm just one person." He had heard the speech before too and didn't feel obliged to hear it again. So he turned on his little heels and started back across the kitchen, across the dining room, and out the front door. As he got to the front screen door, he turned back over his shoulder and he said, "Okay, Mom, but you're going to miss it." Kids know how to get to their mothers. I heard his little voice echoing, put the dish towel down, shut the dishwasher, and followed him across the living room and into the front hallway and opened the screen door. When I opened the door, he heard me and he was about halfway down our hillside. He turned and his little face just broke out in a big old grin. He just waved his hand like this and there was the most gorgeous sunset you had ever seen. The black willow trees were silhouetted against that sunset and the geese were restless flying up across it and a jet stream had gone from the horizon diagonally across that sunset leaving this beautiful magenta ruffle across the sky. He looked back at me and he said, "Look, Mom, there's a ladder clear to heaven." I just gathered him up in my arms and we sat there on the hillside and watched the sun set and disappear. You know how long that took? About seven minutes. I almost missed it for dishes. Trust me, that would not have been a good tradeoff. But that little guy—he didn't know how to say it. He just sensed the stress in our family and at the table and in that room and knew that what I needed was a sunset. And he was right.
Dr. James Dobson: You would have missed it. Shirley, thank you. Gloria, thank you for being our guest today. This has been fun.
Shirley Dobson: It's been great to be here. Thank you.
Gloria Gaither: It's been a treat.