Brenden is now over 13 months old. (!) Along the way we’ve worked hard to take good care of him by meeting his physical, emotional, and mental needs. He’s on a pretty good schedule now, gets good sleep, is active and mostly happy, and eats about normally for his age. But this week we’ve decided that the time has come to focus more on actually parenting him rather than simply making sure he survives. He is a little person entrusted to our care, a lump of clay that we are called to mold into a Godly young man. There’s only one main problem:

We’ve never done this before.

We’ve taken care of babies and young children, but handing out snacks and changing diapers while praying for their parents to arrive soon is much, much different from actually being a parent. We must find ways to teach him the right values, to challenge him enough to help him grow without overwhelming him with a yoke he cannot bear, to help him understand that he is a member of a team rather than the center of the universe. We must work together on a plan to raise him consistently, setting and enforcing the same rules in the same way.

Brenden is a smart little boy who understands a lot of what we say and do even though his spoken vocabulary is very limited. He also inherited my stubbornness and our independent spirits. We need to find a way to teach him the right lessons even though he doesn’t completely understand English or cause and effect quite yet. Since my preferred method of communciation is written English with long, flowing sentences, I must struggle to translate my thoughts into spoken Toddler English that he can understand. I also prefer to think in black-and-white in a maddeningly grayscale world.

What I need is a road map. Turn-by-turn directions are too much to ask, but I want to know generally where we need to go. We’re looking for ideas about books, websites, or other resources on parenting toddlers. If you’re a parent, what have you found that works?