{"id":1179,"date":"2010-07-09T21:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/characterinkblog.com\/day-185-birthday-affirmations-part-i-of-ii\/"},"modified":"2015-06-05T14:16:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T18:16:35","slug":"day-185-birthday-affirmations-part-i-of-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/characterinkblog.com\/day-185-birthday-affirmations-part-i-of-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"day 185: birthday affirmations part i of ii"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">Jakie turned twelve\u2014and, much to his joy&#8211;it was the birthday that never ended! I tried to drag it out, take him to breakfast the day before, take him shopping to let him choose his toy, go to grandparents\u2019 close to the actual day, have his grown siblings over, talk about it a lot, have Dad fix birthday breakfast, etc. as Jacob had been having a lonely time with his three next older siblings all gone that particular week. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">When we asked him what he wanted to do for this birthday, he said two things: (1) play basketball with a group of people in a gym (still working on that one); and (2) have all of his siblings (who were not gone this summer) over and do things together. We are doing the latter this afternoon. His two married siblings and their spouses, our missionary daughter who is home itinerating, and Josiah (our fifteen year old) will all be there. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">When Jacob said he wanted everybody here for his birthday, he wasn\u2019t talking about presents (we don\u2019t do sibling gift exchanges for birthdays) or even outings\/activities. He was referring to the birthday affirmations he would receive. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">As our kids have grown up, we have used birthdays, successes in different things, etc. to teach our kids to affirm each other. Besides our normal, \u201cThree cheers for _______. Hip hip hooray. Hip hip hooray. Hip hip hooray,\u201d we often have times in which we just affirm the person\u2014tell the good qualities that we appreciate in that person. Yes, the \u201caffirmed one\u201d is often embarrassed and a little shy\u2014but these affirmations have come to mean so much to the one receiving them (thus, Jacob\u2019s desire to have \u201ceveryone here like we used to\u201d).<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">I think this type of thing is one of the reasons Kevin Leman recommends in one of his books that birthdays be spent at home together\u2014not in large group parties or out on the town. While you can certainly have a peer party or family outing for a birthday, we recommend that you take the time at home around the birthday child\u2019s special day to affirm and encourage the celebrant.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">Tomorrow I will give a list (of course!) of birthday affirmation ideas. In the meantime, birthday or not, go tell one of your kids one thing you love about him or her\u2026.you will be glad you did.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jakie turned twelve\u2014and, much to his joy&#8211;it was the birthday that never ended! I tried to drag it out, take him to breakfast the day before, take him shopping to let him choose his toy, go to grandparents\u2019 close to the actual day, have his grown siblings over, talk about it a lot, have Dad [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[643,281],"tags":[267,278,280,277,195,283,310,305,319,271,303],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.5.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>day 185: birthday affirmations part i of ii - Character Ink<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/characterinkblog.com\/day-185-birthday-affirmations-part-i-of-ii\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"day 185: birthday affirmations part i of ii - Character Ink\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jakie turned twelve\u2014and, much to his joy&#8211;it was the birthday that never ended! 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