The Power Of Friendship

"Two are better than one: they get a good wage for their labor. If the one falls, the other will lift up his companion. Woe to the solitary man! For if he should fall, he has no one to lift him up."

— Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Everything that I know about success in life I learned from my 6 yr old son, Cole. It was March break and Kelli and I had the Sunny Side UP kids at the park on the first absolutely beautiful spring day of the year. Cole needed a bit of a break from all the other kids so he asked me to push him on the swing. As he swung and we watched as Kelli and her friend led the kids on a little scavenger hunt around the park, out of nowhere he asked me, "Daddy what does, 'the power of friendship' mean?" Normally when Cole asks a question he already has the answer in his head and wants us to ask him what he thinks so he can bounce the idea off us to see how right he is. However, not really knowing the context in which he had ever heard the idiom, I attempted to answer in a way that I could teach him some big life lesson. "Well, I Imagine it means that when people don't get along or they are strangers they spend more time trying to do stuff on their own, but if friends work together they accomplish more. The power is in the strength of not working alone". A simple answer to a question from Cole always, invariably, leads to more questions. A little time went by before he broke the silence again. "Daddy, so I guess the power of friendship is the power of love and the power of team? So, like, if there was a war and people were fighting, they would just all kill each other and no one would have friends, but if they had friendship instead, they would get good stuff done on the world?"I chuckled to myself, mostly out of nervous embarrassment that my son is a deeper thinker than myself. "Yes, that is a great way to put it!" I replied.
A little more time passed, and as I assumed that he was switching gears and changing the subject,  he said something that really melted my heart.
"Daddy I wish you didn't have to go to work tonight. I wish you could just stay home all day"
"I wish I could too," I replied. "Maybe one day I will be able to work from home, like Mommy, and not have to leave".
"Okay daddy, I will watch commercials and see what I can come up with" was his solution.
Without skipping a beat, he went back to the our first conversation about friendship.
"Daddy," he started, "...So what if there was a rock monster attacking the earth? Everyone would have to be friends and work together to defeat the monster right? So it would still be a war, but instead of fighting each other they are fighting their mortal enemy, the rock monster".
I had to agree, "yep, that's probably the best way for them to save the planet!"
He dropped his feet, scuffling them in the gravel under him to stop himself from swinging, jumped off and turned around and looked right at me, like he needed to make sure that I was paying attention, and in a most profound and sureal moment, he tied a string of seemingly unrelated comversations together with this offering, "So, Daddy, if we work together to find a way for you to work from home and not go to work it will be like defeating our enemy the rock monster, because we are best friends and we can do anything together".

There are several nuggets of truth that became real to me that day. The first is that I need to find a way to be home more. The hours that I need to work in order to help provide for my family are, by far, more than they should be. I am one of the few people in the world that readily admits that I enjoy my job, but just to be able to survive financially, like most, I have to sacrifice the quality time that I really should be spending to nurture the emotional and spiritual needs of relationships, whether spousal or parental. Even Kelli, who has built for herself a very successful home daycare, puts in very long hours to ensure her success. There has to be a way for me to duplicate or even increase my income and relieve some of the time spent to earn that income. I need to free up some time for myself, and my family. For a few weeks I had been toying with the idea of Internet Marketing, and was already researching formulating a plan in my head, but this encounter with my youngest catapulted me from thinking about it, to doing it. Not only that, I was practically told what my most important tool would have be to build my business and succeed in it...the power of friendships. How better to fight the 'rock monster' that exists as the daily grind, the mortal enemy that battles our lives and prevents us from fulfilling the most important responsibilities that we have...our children?
This is when I decided that friendship building would become the key to unlock my time restrainst.
it was out of this experience that KellyandKelli.com was bourn.

A New Beginning...

   This truly IS a new beginning. It is a time in our life where we realize how important it is to be healthy. For years I thought about it...eating properly, exercising, spending less time dying and more time living, but always told myself it was too late. Well here I am at 43 years old and I finally realize that `too late` will come much sooner if I don`t do something about it. Both Kelli and I want to be here, not only for our kids, but also their kids.
   It is also a new beginning for us in our venture into the world of blogging. Aside from designing her home daycare website ( http://www.sunnysideupkidsclub.ca ), we really have no experience in developing an online presence. I guess this blog is our way of being part of the way our world works these days.
   Blogging about our path to a better us seemed the most obvious way to tie all our `self improvement`roads together. One of our desires is to be more effective in the lives of those around us, so hopefully as we journal our new path we will in some way inspire others to do the same. In an editorial from the October issue of Success Magazine Editor (name here) wrote that true success is measured, not by financial or material gain, but by our significance in this world.We want to become better and also inspire others to become better.
   Throughout the days, weeks and years ahead we will pass on any interesting info that we learn about healthy and wellness and look forward more than anything to receiving comments and input from our friends, old and new.
We will gladly post links to interesting and helpful websites or blogs of people or businesses who we feel could benefit us and others on our road. We are more than conscious of the fact that not everyone will agree with what we find out or come to believe, and that`s okay. It is a journey and there will trials and triumphs, but the most important thing is that we make informed decisions along the way.
   Thank you for taking the time to follow our blog and as we go forward we pray that we can both learn from you and inspire you to become better in all areas of life.
God Bless.