What I did on my summer vacation

Vacation with the family was excellent. Jen already posted a good synopsis so go there for the scoop.

The most interesting thing which I got on vacation was an understanding of the desire to parent other people's children. Many of my dear friends have expressed a desire to parent children whose parents are obviously not doing the job well. I thought my friends were being hard on other people who were merely having a momentary lapse in discipline. I was wrong and I apologize to all my dear friends. Momentary lapses of discipline are obvious and easily forgivable since concerned parents resume discipline shortly thereafter. For example, a toddler who sneaked under a pew at Mass for a minute, only to have mommy pick her up and sit her back on the pew with a sternly whispered reprimand. That was a lapse in discipline, a lack of discipline looked completely different.

On vacation, we took an evening family cruise to go fishing in the bay near Ocean City, NJ. The nearly complete lack of discipline on the family cruise was rather scary. The five year old son of the captain of the boat repeatedly pointed the bilge pump at me and my family in spite of occasional reprimands from the captain. I took it away from him and placed it where he could not get it. The eight year old son of the captain repeatedly disobeyed his dad and eventually started flailing his fishing rod, hook and all, in the general vicinity of my daughter's eyeballs. Pop and I both stepped in and vigorously reprimanded the boy while removing the rod from his grasp.

Quite frankly, a lack of discipline is not just scary, but dangerous and potentially blinding.