Jake Frost is the author of Catholic Dad, (Mostly) Funny Stories of Faith, Family and Fatherhood to Encourage and Inspire, a $0.99 e-book on Amazon. He is a lawyer in hiatus, having temporarily traded diapers for depositions and kitchens for court rooms to care for his pre-school aged children. He comes from a large family in a small town of the Midwest, and lives near the Mississippi River with his wife and kids.
A few days before Easter our clan would gather around the dining room table, cover it with newspapers, and get dirty. Or rather: colorful. Lots of little fingers got stained purple, pink and green while dipping hard boiled eggs into cups of die. The more artistically inclined among us would draw crayon designs on their […]
It was a rainy, inside day, so I went to the craft boxes to see what I might find. Cereal boxes—perfect! I generally try to save cereal boxes for just such occasions when you find yourself unexpectedly confined indoors—you can do a million different projects with those things—and today, with some markers and scissors, construction […]
Have you ever found a really good series of kids’ books, something the kids love to hear read aloud and to re-read on their own (or for our kids, to leaf through and look at the pictures again), but wished that there was something more in them than a light adventure story? I love reading […]
I’m like a Christmas caterpillar. During the holidays, I put on a fuzzy sweater and eat my way through the season. By the Epiphany, the sweater is a little snug. But that’s ok. I think of it as just a phase in my evolving yuletide metamorphosis, as I pass through different stages of development on […]
Growing up, Saint Nicholas Day meant three things: the fireplace, stocking caps, and the biggest pair of shoes you could find. It started the evening before, when we finished the family rosary. We always ended our rosary with the ‘blowing of the candle.’ Well, actually it wasn’t a candle, it was a little oil lamp […]
You’ve got to take whatever life throws at you. And if you’re a parent, you probably have to wipe it up, too — especially when it comes to craft time. Few words can strike more fear in the hearts of parents with young toddlers than “craft time.” When the paint is flying and the glue […]
PVC is amazing stuff. Its versatility rivals that of Duct Tape. And growing up, we always had plenty of both around the house. The PVC was mostly for Dad’s plumbing work on our house, which seemed constant. I guess eight kids put a lot of mileage on the pipes. As for the Duct Tape, as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
