John and Linda's little boy-brood makes me so happy (as do John and Linda, both amazing, kind, compassionate human beings). I love watching them play and fight and argue and yell and get into trouble as little boys are wont to do.
After the kids fought over the robot and the tank for a little while, Andrew and Daniel played with Micah's ball maze while Jack and Max each earned their own respective time-outs.
Incidentally, after dinner, we the 
parents chatted about books and babies and God and faith and failings while trying to discern cries of pain from cries of frustration emanating from Max's bedrooms. When I picked up one of my favorite books about boys, Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men, to share with Linda, John said he was familiar with the book. It turns out John Eldredge was inspired by it, which makes perfect sense given Eldredge's market niche. It is a book that every mother and every wife should read at least once. On that note, Robert Bly is quite a fascinating charcter himself. You can learn more about him in a roundabout way from this interview by Daniel Egger. I excerpted a few interesting bits on this writer and poet below:
Robert Bly was a Movement leader, and the war in Vietnam stands behind this book. Bly views the radical break in generations which characterized the Vietnam War at home as a consequence of the long-broken connection between fathers and sons. Modern history provided the dynamic, but the war brought a crisis. Distrust of the father, a quiet reality of U.S. life, became riotous rebellion as a consequence of the war, where all distrust proved justified. Bly says, "The older men in the American military establishment and government did betray the younger men in Vietnam, lying about the nature of the war, remaining in safe places themselves, after having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers." (at p.95) That rift has never been healed, or even acknowledged and mourned.
The story of the lives of U.S. men which Bly tells is easily recognizable. As men grow up, they seek without clear direction to do what society expects. They work dutifully, but even as they "succeed" they find feelings freezing up and vitality drifting away. Friendships fade and they slip into isolation. By the time they reach 45 or 50 they are numb inside. Children find them foolish and wives find them dull.
.......
Bly began to recognize the crippled inner life of men in U.S. culture when he was in his mid-40s. He had achieved success as a poet, but he had never written a word about his father. Bly began a process of self-investigation, supplemented by formalized discussions with other men, perhaps an outgrowth of veterans' rap groups. He concluded that in almost all cultures boys are taken from their parents and deliberately initiated into manhood by the older men of society. There men acquire roles which encompass the full range of men's inner experience.
