The Davolts

 Hey. Remember me? I know it's been awhile. A whole year, I think.  It sure has been a year. I cannot count the number of times I considered writing reflections on the year here. Surely, this was a year to record our place in a history-making pandemic? But just as often as I thought about writing here, I stopped myself; after all, what makes my experiences different or worth noting? We have collectively endured a year of loss, struggles, pain. So, I'm not going to write a long recap of our entire year here.  Instead, I want to write about writing. I know I have another post on the subject but this one has a different purpose. Jeff recently sent me an opinion piece from The Washington Post that immediately resonated with me:  Journaling for kids: How (and why) to start a journaling practice with kids  Like the author, I was encouraged to journal as a kid. As the author notes, journaling helped me process the most significant events in my life, such as the loss of my mom and othe

I absolutely love having two boys.  There is an energy and excitement that definitely keeps me young.  When meeting other parents with all boys there is always an unacknowledged kinship and assumption that we deal with the same rowdiness, crudeness and overall chaos that is a house of young boys.  For six years now I have always said I am so thankful to have all boys rather than girls.  There is this assumption that boys are so much easier than girls.  That as a father girls are so much scarier.  That things like braiding hair, princesses and unicorns, teenage love, menstrual cycles, and protecting sexual innocence are so much harder for a father to navigate as a parent of a female.  But what if this assumption that boys are easier, that they are less work, that boys are not as high maintenance to parent as girls is partly responsible for toxic masculinity and so many of our societal problems that can be traced back to the patriarchy? I think about raising men all the time.  Not on