An Idea for Our Time?: Family Standup

During these trying shelter-in-place times, our family has adopted a habit from my job: a daily standup.  I work on a software development team, and in software development, especially when using agile methods, teams gather daily for a short, structured meeting called a standup.

The format seeks to correct the ills of longer, less frequent meetings.  It gets straight to the point and maximizes shared knowledge.  It's also designed to identify (as a first step to overcoming) "blockers."  A blocker may take many forms, but it does like it's named: it blocks someone from completing a task that they want to/have to/are trying to do.

Also in the eponymous theme, in standup, we stand up.  Not settling into chairs underscores how quickly the meeting is supposed to go.  

The team goes around in a circle and answers three simple questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. What (if anything) is blocking me?

It's important that everyone in the meeting, regardless of their role, answers all three questions.  It's about transparency and acknowledgment that we all need to know what we're all working on in order to make individual and shared decisions and to support each other.

So during COVID-19 home confinement, we have adopted this idea for our family.  We read about the idea several years ago in Bruce Feller's The Secrets of Happy Families.  He described a weekly version of the meeting that his family had adopted.  He extolled how the every-person-speaks nature of the meeting gave voice to his children.  Sometimes, kids don't get to talk, and parents don't have to share what's going on with them.  Standup can help.

We've been gathering at 9:30 (30 minutes after the teenagers have to be awake) to step through our version of standup.  Other families might do something different, but here's what we do:

• We go through the form for Family Prayer in the Morning from the brand-new 2019 Anglican Church in North America Book of Common Prayer.  We include one verse of a favorite hymn, and we pray prayers of gratitude or asking for help for ourselves or others. It helps us remember our place in the universe and the source of our hope.
• The boys report on what they did yesterday, and what they plan to do today in self-guided academic exploration and how they plan to get outside.
• We go over household chores that the boys need to do during the day.  Where there are options, they divvy them up among themselves.
• We identify any blockers and very quickly brainstorm the next thing we can do to clear that blocker.
• The parents report on when they will be on calls and video conferences so that everyone knows when wi-fi bandwidth might be both taxed and important. Our kids haven't stated getting school assignments yet, but they will soon, and wi-fi might become the issue for us that it is for others already.
• We review any evening details that need to be discussed like shared dinner prep plans or any plans we have as a nuclear family or to Zoom with family or friends.
• We finish with a group hug.

The group hug wasn't originally part of it.  That's another beauty of standup: the members of the meeting can suggest ways to tweak the meeting to optimize it for everyone.  My Competent Wife proposed that addition.  We also found that we needed to bump our younger son's wake-up time earlier because he eats breakfast slowly.  Standup works when everyone arrives on time and ready to engage.  

And when it's over, we move on informed, unblocked, and ready to go about our day.

Grace

We just added a new grace to our rotation before dinners.  We got it from a Dennis the Menace cartoon quoting a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem.  Of course.  Where do you get your graces?

Families say grace all different kinds of ways.  I grew up on the evangelical, theoretically free-form grace.  I say theoretically free-form because liturgy creeps in whether we choose it or not.  Individuals and groups establish rhythms and repeat phrases.  So, although we didn't have prescribed prayers, as each person prayed, they tended to thank for and ask for the same things habitually.

Now that we have kids, we pray a short rotation of regular graces.  The greatest hit, of course, is God is Great.  There are others, including an express grace.  More on that later. 

The new grace is:
For each new morning with its light
For rest and shelter of the night
For health and peace
For love and friends
For everything thy goodness sends
Father in heaven
We thank thee


Ol' Emerson stopped after the list.  The Church of the Brethren added the Father in heaven part, and we think it gives the whole enterprise the appropriate meaning.  And yes, as you know (admit it!), this was the Dennis the Menace cartoon on the Sunday before Thanksgiving this year, showing scenes of family and Thanksgiving goodness.

We also pray the full God is Great:

God is great, God is good
And we thank Him for our food
By His hands, we all are fed
Give us Lord our daily bread.

I include that one here because, as I said, it's the greatest hit of family graces.  Also, though, two people have said to us this fall that they'd never heard the second two lines.  I thought that was the international standard.  What do you know?  My brother and his wife are raising their kids to say "Thank you Lord for daily bread", which sounds a lot more grateful and trusting than our demand.  Oh well.  God is Great has a way of just being there, but it's actually a very solid, theological prayer.  We start by talking about God, not us and acknowledging his nature as both powerful and good.  We show gratitude, understanding that He provides for us.  We don't ask for too much - as in the Lord's Prayer - just bread for today.

Until Emerson, our most elegant grace came to us source unknown but probably Episcopal in nature:
For food and homes and loving care
For all that makes the world so fair
We thank thee, Heavenly Father.

That's a good one, and people who haven't heard it before ask about it and try to remember it.

Perhaps our longest grace, I learned at a Salvation Army boys' home in Malaysia where I did a short-term mission in college.  It was chanted quick-time in 6-17-year-old Malay accented English with a very specific rhythm:
Thank you for the food we eat
Thank you for the world so sweet
Thank you for the birds that sing
Thank you Lord for everything.  Amen.

It doesn't look that long written out.  In Malaysia, the prayer gathered speed as it went, so "Amen" sounded like the fourth and fifth syllables of "everything'.

Finally, our "express grace" when dinner prep has taken too long, or we need to go somewhere right after dinner is this:
For every cup and plateful,
Lord, make us truly grateful.

Amen.

A Prayer for my Sons' Wives

For some reason, one of the things I think about often when I stop into the boys' room after they're asleep is who they'll marry when they get older.  Sometimes I pray something like this for each of them:

Dear Lord,
One day, this boy is (hopefully) going to marry someone.
Please make her smart.
Please help him love her because she makes him a better person.
It will really help if she knows and follows you, Lord.
For everyone's sake, please make sure she has a sense of humor.
Please give her a generous spirit and patience.
Please make her practical and ready to work hard.
I know he'll think she's cute, so I don't need to ask for that.
Please give her a long life and good health.
Please let them agree on how they spend, save and donate money.
This may be selfish, Lord, but please make him choose for life someone with cool, well-adjusted parents.
Please make her the kind who will call him on his [bleep]. Gently.
Please forgive my language.
Finally, Lord, it's a lot to ask in this crazy, mixed up world, but:
Please make her like baseball.
Amen

A prayer with two audiences

The other day at dinner, Charlie (7) was getting jealous of all of the wonderful things that Teddy (3) had gotten to do that day with me. He was bummed because he'd had to be at school and couldn't, for instance, go to the grocery store. Teddy loves our grocery store because it has cookie cards - buy the card for a dollar for charity at the beginning of the year and present it at the bakery and kids get a free cookie each visit.

With that context, this was Teddy's prayer during family devotions after dinner:

"Thank you that I could ride in the race car cart and get provolone cheese and have a cookie...and Charlie didn't...Ha ha!"