Jake Frost is a stay-at-home Dad and lawyer in hiatus, having temporarily traded depositions for diapers and court rooms for kitchens to care for his pre-school age children. He comes from a large family in a small town of the Midwest and now lives near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota.
God gives Moms big hearts because He knows they’re going to need them. Especially when the Mom in question happens to live in a family full of jokesters. Take our family, where the Jokester-in-Chief is none other than Dad himself. One time Mom went down to the basement to do a load of laundry and [...]
When I was a kid my Mom used to embroider old sayings and decorate them with stitched designs and images. When they were finished she’d frame them and hang them on the walls, so that walking through our house was a little tour through the patrimony of wisdom from the ages, all arrayed in a [...]
For Ash Wednesday last year, my wife and I took the kids to mass at Fulton Sheen’s old seminary, the St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Located on bluffs above the Mississippi River, with a fine view of the river and the Minneapolis sky line across the water, it has a neat old church [...]
I was putting our younger daughter to sleep, and as we snuggled in the chair, I started singing: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .” She picked up the tune and sang the next line: “. . . Jack Frost sniffing at your nose . . .” Christmas is full of surprises. Especially [...]
I was talking to my Dad one Sunday evening while I stood in the backyard flipping burgers on the grill. “How was your weekend?” Dad asked. “Fine,” I said. “We didn’t do much; the lake yesterday in the morning then cooked out some steaks in the evening. Today it was church in the morning, then [...]
Our three year old daughter Liz was in the backseat of the car while my wife was driving. Mom made a wrong turn. “Grrr,” my wife grumbled, “wrong turn!” From the backseat Liz’s voice chimed: “Recalculating!” That made my wife crack-up. But while Mom was laughing out loud, Liz didn’t see the humor. “That’s what [...]
My grandfather was a hardworking man. Growing up in frontier country, he started his career as a carpenter building barns; then travelled the West as an itinerant farm laborer. In World War I, he enlisted in the Marines and fought in Europe, including the Battle of Belleau Wood and the Battle of Chateau Thierry. He [...]
Human beings have a desire to impose order on the universe. But much like a parent’s desire to impose order on their kids’ toys, it often goes unsatisfied. With the toys, at least we have a fighting chance (depending on the age of the kids and the volume of plastic flowing in from grandparents – [...]
Children have a way of reaching into your heart to find love you didn’t even know was there. I was working away in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner and get the dishes done at the same time, when my daughters came in looking for Daddy. “What are you doing, Daddy?” Liz, our older daughter [...]
Every child deserves to be the most important person in the world to someone. The ever pithy Lou Holtz, who said of himself: “I’m so old I don’t even buy green bananas anymore,” once made an observation to the effect of: “80% of people don’t care about you one way or the other. 19% of [...]
Have you ever wondered how many people you’ll meet in your lifetime? I was on a road trip with my wife and kids last week and we stopped at the Worlds’ Loneliest McDonald’s. I’ve also been to what local urban legend reputes to be The World’s Busiest McDonalds. It stands all alone amid the never [...]
Who can name the geniuses who have wrought our modern world? The scientists and engineers whose imagination, sweat and determination created the artifacts of material culture we use and rely upon each day? I’m not talking Thomas Edison, Henry Ford or the Wright brothers. Everyone already knows about light-bulbs and cars and airplanes. But how [...]
My brother John has a great photo from the birth of his first child. It’s a picture of his daughter’s unbelievably tiny baby-hand gripping his finger. His daughter’s whole hand, so perfectly formed and so amazingly small, can only just wrap around John’s bony knuckle. You just can’t conceive how they were ever that little. [...]
There is beauty in the world. There is peace in the world. There is joy. In fact, there’s lots of it. Only, there’s lots of other stuff too. Sometimes trying to recognize the good things is like trying to find the right web-site. Your search returns 6 million hits. So where’s the one you want? [...]
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” — Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill purchased that insight with dear experience. I didn’t realize what a rollercoaster of Himalaya-highs and Death-Valley-lows his life was until I listened to The Teaching Company lecture series Churchill by J. Rufus Fears. The [...]
My wife and I were at the home of another married couple for dinner. While a roast finished cooking, we sat around the table talking and eating salad. When the oven timer rang, the wife turned to her husband and said, “That’s a corn job.” The husband got up and went to the kitchen. He [...]
Talk is cheap. E-mail is even cheaper. Maybe that’s why we’re inundated with trash talk and junk mail (of both the snail variety and it’s fleeter “e” relation). Silence – now that’s precious. Silence is golden. It’s also rare. You don’t realize just how rare until your one-year-old falls asleep in the stroller and you’re [...]
Sometimes I marvel at the creative power of the human mind. Like whoever first thought of grabbing the wind out of the sky and putting it to work for us. Someone, somewhere long ago, needed more grain milled. What to do? Get more serfs, hire more hands, harness more horses. But what if you don’t [...]
Ralph McInerny was an interesting guy. (I use the past tense merely to conform to convention since he died January 29, 2010, even though it is incorrect, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of the living. Mt 22, 32.) Perhaps McInerny’s widest popular notoriety came as creator of the Father [...]
The Bard of the Yukon, Robert Service, penned the immortal lines: There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tails, that would make your blood run cold; So began The Cremation of Sam McGee, the poem that would make [...]
You know the song: Lean on me, when you’re not strong And I’ll be your friend I’ll help you carry on For it won’t be long ‘Til I’m gonna need Somebody to lean on Now: who wrote it? Don’t worry if you can’t remember. The songwriter himself said: “Nobody knows who I am. Sometimes if [...]
My Mom and Dad are exactly the sort of people you’d love to go on a road trip with. If you happen to be a Benedictine monk. Just kidding, of course. Even Benedictines find Mom and Dad a little austere. Most notorious of their ascetic proclivities is the (in)famous “iron-bladder” straight-through policy. If a trip [...]
When my wife and I found out we were having our first baby, I was ecstatic. The coming of the new baby filled all my thoughts. I got to be a boring conversationalist, with only one topic to discuss. It was uncanny the connections I now saw (which had never been apparent to me before) [...]
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I can only add: “Especially when it comes to pairing socks.” Oh, how the mighty fall. I thought I had everything ready. All the details were attended to and I thought I knew exactly how the next several hours would unfold: exactly [...]
