If you’re relishing the rise of fermented cucumber these days, hold onto your gherkins. Not only are pickles clutch for charcuterie, but the brine can bring you back to life.  There’s a time and place for Kool-Aid pickles and 24-layer pickle cake (that time may be never), but standard pickle juice can help your muscles recover faster than you can say “please pass the emergency cornichons.”  This protocol played out in real time in front of nearly 70,000 people at Seattle Stadium during the World Cup. As the U.S. battled it out against Australia, field referee Felix Zwayer suddenly fell to the ground with a muscle cramp in the middle of the game. After a little stretching did nothing to quell the pain, Zwayer downed a shot of pickle juice and was back in the game.  So was it some kind of miracle pickle-lixir? More like the right minerals at exactly the right time. Muscle cramps can happen for a variety of reasons such as holding a position too long, pinching a nerve, or straining a muscle. But when you sweat out body-balancing electrolytes during exercise, your muscles freak out. That’s where pickle juice comes in.  Pickle brine boasts concentrated amounts of potassium and sodium, both of which are essential for body function. Known as electrolytes, they serve as two key minerals that form an electric charge when mixed with body fluids, helping to regulate hydration and keep your cells nourished. Sodium and potassium, in particular, do the heavy lifting when it comes to muscle function.   Since the brine also has no protein or fat, it’s quick to digest. FIFA Official Zwayer may have chugged something similar to Pickle Juice, which reportedly goes to work in 60 seconds. Another factor may be the cheek-pinching flavor. If you’ve ever felt a pickle juice kick in the back of your throat, that’s precisely the characteristic this remedy leverages. Pickle Juice, the registered performance beverage, claims to interrupt the stressed-out nerve signals between your brain and your muscles (via zippy shock to your throat), thus lessening the pain of a cramp. Studies show that it works. If straight pickle brine isn’t exactly your jam, a more palatable pickle lemonade offers the benefits with a refreshing twist. Providing sip-worthy recovery for runners and other athletes looking to replenish sodium more quickly than they would by drinking plain water, lemon and a little sweetener help the pickle juice go down. An added benefit? Unlike store-bought electrolyte drinks, a DIY recipe gives you more control over the ingredients you put in your body. But this isn’t the only reason it might be time to swap that hot sauce in your bag for a jar of bread and butter chips. If you think the phrase “good for you” also applies to your soul, get ready because “pickle” is the flavor of the summer.  Calling it a “pickle renaissance,” food trend spotter and author of the Snaxshot newsletter Andrea Hernandez says, “It’s not something that just feels gimmicky — it’s a major unlock for a category that has been sleepy for a while.” Contrasting the overdone mid-2000s bacon trend that was not-so-secretly engineered by Big Pork, she says the pickle rise was more of a grassroots initiative. Even snacks that were never cucumbers have gotten the pickle treatment. There’s a world in which dill pickle-flavored popcorn, peanut butter, protein bars, jelly beans, pretzels, jerky, and canned tuna exists, and we’re already living in it. But more unexpected flavor pairings also seem to be fair game.  Sam’s Club is so confident in the enduring popularity of its cake pops that it’s camouflaging “surprise” pickle pops among fan-favorite pineapple and blue raspberry flavors. And Smoothie King hopes to leverage the electrolyte craze with a pickle smoothie featuring fresh-blended Grillo’s Pickles spears. If that sounds weird, maybe the bananas and coconut water will help. While pickles and ice cream may have been the pregnancy craving trope of the ’80s, it’s now what you’d call a thing. Whether you shave frozen pickles on top of a scoop of vanilla, or concoct a pickled syrup, it’s the sweet and savory combo to erase all other pairings from your mind. Over in the drinks category, pickle juice is popping up in margaritas, and frozen pickles add dimension to a glass of white wine. Despite being a fan of wine-flavored wine, I had to see what all the pickle fuss was about. It’s also not beyond my talents to slice up a few gherkins, freeze them, and drop them into a glass of sauvignon blanc. I actually loved the briny contrast to the herbaceous citrus of the wine, and my frozen pickles kept things chill without diluting the flavor like ice. Five out of five stars, would recommend. (Snacking on room temp, wine-soaked gherkins I forgot at the bottom of the glass? Maybe not.)   I fully reject pickle-flavored Oreos and peppermint stick pickles with the ferocity of a toddler who refuses to eat her favorite foods when they touch. But for further proof of a heartily embraced variation on the theme, look no further than the pickle festivals and state fair offerings that remain unapologetic about brazenly expanding your dill-pickled horizons. As some of us prepare to pay our respects to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the official pickle queen of the World’s Largest Pickle Party in Texas, the Minnesota State Fair hopes to tempt visitors with dill pickle seltzer. Kentucky’s Dainty Fest already hosted a pickle juice-chugging contest that was less about balancing electrolytes and more about crushing the competition. Traveling festivals such as Pickle Palooza offer mechanical pickle rides along with food creations like “Dilled Cheese,” “Dilly Cheesesteak,” and pickle candy. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania’s Picklesburgh leveled things up with pickleball and pickle-bobbing contests for anyone who thinks too many pickles is never enough. Maybe we’re tipping into oversaturation in this current pickleconomy, but until then, brine on. *** This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Police identified a 15-year-old and a 19-year-old as gunmen behind the deadly shooting that turned a Seattle food festival into a chaotic nightmare on Sunday. Authorities also said they are looking for “a third possible suspect” in the shooting. The two teens opened fire in a large crowd that included young children, resulting in the death of 19-year-old gunman Junior Cee Niko Semo, who was hit by multiple rounds of gunfire, according to the medical examiner. Two other people were also shot and killed: Ashley Whitehead, 56, and Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba, 44. Four people, including a 2-year-old boy, were wounded in the shooting. Police believe the deadly shooting could be gang-related and that the two teenagers were “associates.” The 15-year-old has not been named by authorities and is currently being held in juvenile detention. Shots rang out at around 6:00 p.m. PT at the Bite of Seattle food festival, an annual free weekend-long event that typically attracts 350,000 people. When police arrived on the scene, two people were seen shooting at each other and officers immediately sought to chase down the suspects while other officers provided first aid to the wounded, according to the Seattle Police Department. One suspect was taken into custody “within seconds,” Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said on Monday evening. Three of the shooting victims were found in the direction where the 15-year-old suspect is believed to have fired, including the toddler who was with his mother when he was struck by gunfire, according to court documents, NBC News reported. The toddler is currently in stable condition and recovering well. After the shooting, Seattle authorities have faced criticism over the city’s response to the shooting and have gotten into heated exchanges with reporters. City officials are facing questions over why they waited nearly five hours to provide an update on the shooting, especially considering one of the gunmen was at-large. Leftist mayor opened her press conference on Sunday with a discussion on “gun violence,” arguing that the city and the country have “a lot of work to do … to make this better.” A reporter chimed in shortly into the mayor’s spiel, asking her to get to the information on the shooting. “I get your passion, mayor, but we need to know what happened tonight, please.” Then, on Monday, a reporter asked Shon Barnes why he wasn’t in the city on Sunday night when the shooting occurred. The city’s assistant police chief handled the immediate response and the initial press briefing on Sunday night. “I don’t have to tell you where I go,” Barnes told a KOMO News reporter. “I have a medical procedure I gotta do on Friday. … You need to know this: I have been here working as hard as I can for this city from the day I got here. You got that?” “There are reports that you are out of town often,” the reporter pressed. “Their reports are wrong, you understand?” the chief shot back as another man stepped in between him and the reporter.

Video games might seem like a fairly apolitical hobby, but conservative gamers are constantly under attack from their own community. It is next to impossible to follow the gaming industry without being bombarded with leftist ideology. Much in the same way that Hollywood is filled with leftists, so is the gaming space. In 2024, Sweet Baby Inc, whose stated goal was to work with game studios to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, began infiltrating everyday games. The organization worked behind the scenes on at least 30 games, which caused independent YouTuber Kabrutus to curate a list of games it had contributed to so people could boycott them. These games range from the independent scene (Neo Cab, Alan Wake II) to massive AAA games (God of War Ragnarök, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2). Creators such as Geeks + Gamers and HeelsVsBabyface amplified these conversations, with larger-platformed individuals such as Daily Wire host Matt Walsh and Elon Musk even addressing the story. Two of the top-ranked gaming podcasts, Giant Bomb and Kinda Funny, contain, in almost every episode, “Super-Chats” (paid messages sent in by viewers and listeners), comments, or emails that include sentiments such as “f*ck ICE” and “trans rights are human rights.” Near the opening of the March 25 episode of Kinda Funny’s daily gaming news show, the hosts proudly tell those who are vaccine-hesitant to “get f*cked.” These podcasts aren’t alone in their leftism. They are the norm. The message from gaming news outlets to podcasts to studios is clear: If you don’t conform, we’re not interested in you. Are you someone who doesn’t orient your whole personality around the Jews? For a period of time in 2025, it was nearly impossible to hear about XBOX gaming news without getting a lecture on the BDS movement. Gaming media writers were conflicted over whether it was OK to cover XBOX because it was owned by Microsoft, which happened to be “partnered” with the state of Israel. Their statement was “genocide is not a game.” Are you a believer in capitalism? The gaming press has a lot to say about that. Here is a Polygon piece using Animal Crossing to support Marxism. A more recent Gamespot feature contrasts Animal Crossing with the new game Pokopia to praise its non-capitalist structure. An author at Kotaku wrote this article to blame the video game industry crash of 1983 on capitalism. Here is a listicle from TheGamer of the top 10 “Best Games With Anti-Capitalist Themes.” Yes, even presumably capitalist companies that exist and thrive solely because of that system will create games that resonate with the gaming press. The recent viral news of XBOX implementing sizable layoffs elicited incessant vitriol at for-profit companies that prioritize maximum growth. Jason Schreier, Bloomberg’s video game industry reporter, said of XBOX on the Triple Click podcast, “I think I believe pretty strongly that there should be a cap on the amount of money that a person can have.” Senator Bernie Sanders stepped into the conversation to criticize “trickle-down economics,” and many outlets were quick to amplify his statements. It seems impossible to listen to breakdowns of that story without relentless anti-free market tirades. Were you one of the millions of people who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024? The gaming industry despises this man and his supporters. During the 2016 election season, the founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, one of the modern progenitors of the VR headset, was essentially forced out of his company when it was discovered he had donated money to a pro-Trump organization. Scott Cawthon, the developer of the wildly successful Five Nights at Freddy’s, was made to apologize and ultimately retired from public game development for the same reason. Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), one of the creators of what would become the modern independent game revolution, became a target this year after his right-of-center political views were used to attack him. In 2025, 1047 Games cofounder Ian Proulx took heated criticism for wearing a hat that read “Make FPS [First-Person Shooters] Great Again” because it was evocative of the “Make America Great Again” slogan. Despite all this, everyday gamers aren’t all on board. Gaming journalism clashed with player-bases in 2023 during the release of Hogwarts Legacy. The game was based in the world of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” but Rowling’s stance against transgenderism had left many on the Left struggling with whether or not they could continue to enjoy her work. Unsurprisingly, the attempted boycott failed miserably, and Hogwarts Legacy continues even now to sell in massive numbers. Hogwarts Legacy’s afterlife tells the story of a boycott campaign, amplified across gaming media, failing to make a dent in sales. There’s a gap between what gaming coverage insists its audience believes and what that audience actually does with its money. That gap almost certainly exists across the entire relationship between the gaming press and the people who actually play games. Are the tens of millions of people who buy Call of Duty every year made up entirely of anti-gun, anti-military liberals? For clear proof that people want alternative takes, look no further than Asmongold. He’s a Twitch streamer who averages tens of thousands of concurrent viewers per stream and has drawn peak crowds north of 450,000 people watching concurrently, making him one of the platform’s most-watched channels. He plays a number of popular games and reacts to gaming controversies as they arise. When Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed art director posted that the industry had “too many crusty white dudes” who needed replacing, Asmongold said what a large chunk of that audience was already thinking: “Total performative bulls***.” That clip went viral in a way gaming journalism could only hope to achieve. The demand for anyone to say the obvious thing about how the industry treats its audience isn’t a hypothetical. What doesn’t exist is anyone doing that with the regularity of the liberal media. This is where the Right has an opportunity. Conservative pundits almost universally treat video games with contempt. Sometimes they acknowledge that, in moderation, there is nothing wrong with the hobby, but the obvious disdain they have for people who take the gaming industry seriously is clear. If politics are downstream from culture, conservatives should want to be actively involved in that front of the culture war, not just for engagement on the most recent controversy, but out of interest and principle. Movie reviews from conservatives are valuable and rightfully sought out. Gaming pulled in roughly $190 billion worldwide in 2025, dwarfing the global box office‘s roughly $33 billion by a factor of five or six. Treating the largest entertainment industry on the planet as beneath serious attention is a poor strategic choice. The demand is there. The supply isn’t. The Left runs the industry and never misses a chance to remind you of it. Tens of millions of people just want to follow video game news without a Marxist undertone, but nobody is serving them. *** This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

For the last few weeks, Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” movie has been a more divisive topic for conservatives than the war with Iran. Is it woke or secretly based? Is it unfaithful to the original (and if so, is that good or bad)? Is anyone who sees it “an enemy of Western Civilization”? As always, trillionaire entrepreneur and anti-woke crusader Elon Musk is an eager participant in these debates. This time, though, Musk isn’t just complaining. He’s proposed two ways to make a more conservative-friendly “Odyssey” and offered to put real effort behind making them happen.  The first is a nonstarter. “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Elon posted to X last week. I’m sure that’ll be technically possible, but it’s certainly not desirable. Replacing a creative process that involves real actors in real places where real light strikes real lenses with a guy at a keyboard entering prompts would not be a victory for conservative art. It would be the abolition of art itself. If anyone can, with a few keystrokes, make the exact movie he wants to see, then cinema ceases to play its role as a cultural artifact. It no longer emerges from and shapes the zeitgeist.  The proliferation of AI-generated “Odyssey” adaptations Elon proposes might be aesthetically impressive, but these movies would not bring people together the way Nolan’s has — not even to hate them. They would be pieces of worthless slop that took no effort to create and leave audiences more isolated and demoralized than ever. AI can supplement filmmakers’ efforts, as Ben Affleck’s half-billion-dollar start-up InterPositive promises to do. It cannot replace them. Elon’s other idea, which he got from pseudonymous Substack blogger John Carter, is more interesting: “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.” Gibson is a political conservative and an able director who has proven his ability to handle epic material (“Braveheart”), make blockbusters that appeal to the religious right (“The Passion of the Christ”), and successfully immerse audiences in a wholly alien culture (“Apocalypto”). But if Elon wants to fund a mega-budget project for him, the Odyssey is the wrong choice. Making Gibson’s “Odyssey” as a direct response to Nolan’s would seem reactive, derivative, and petty. Audiences would perceive a rushed-out remake funded by Elon’s money and motivated by his resentments as a political stunt and would understandably avoid it. Too many conservative artists seem content to make “conservative art” that appeals solely to committed conservatives. Instead of winning back the culture, they preach to the choir. Gibson is living proof that it doesn’t have to be this way, and saddling him with a project doomed to languish in the conservative ghetto would be a tremendous waste of his talents. Fortunately, there’s a far better candidate for an Elon-funded, Mel-directed, swords-and-sandals epic poem adaptation: Virgil’s “Aeneid.” This masterpiece, written soon after Rome transitioned from republic to empire, follows a band of Trojans who escape the fall of their city, wander the Mediterranean for years, fight to win a new homeland in Italy, and fulfill their destiny by becoming the forefathers of Rome. Virgil borrows settings, plot elements, and even his protagonist — the Trojan prince Aeneas — from the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” but his poem has a different “vibe” than either of Homer’s epics. In Homer, time is a flat circle. Odysseus failing to make it home would be bad news for Telemachus and Penelope, but it would have no world-historic consequences. Neither would Troy’s defenders driving the Argives into the sea. No matter what happens, things will go on as they always have. Men strive to win glory in battle, the gods engage in their petty squabbles, and Fate hands down its mysterious, arbitrary decrees. Everything in the “Aeneid” bears the weight of history, and history itself has an end toward which it is progressing. For Virgil, this telos is Roman dominion. Rome’s divine calling is to “rule with all [its] power / the peoples of the earth.” Aeneas’ journeys and wars are sowing the seeds of universal empire, and Virgil constantly reminds us of the growth they’ll one day produce.  Aeneas himself struggles under the burden of this lofty destiny. In some ways, his sense of duty makes him more human. C.S. Lewis describes him as a “grown-up” compared to whom Achilles seems like a “passionate boy.” In other ways, it has the opposite effect. Edith Hamilton argues that, by the end of the poem, Aeneas “is not a man,” but “something strange and portentous.” In the hands of most Hollywood directors, an “Aeneid” adaptation would probably lean toward the latter. Aeneas would have much in common with Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” trilogy: an initially relatable hero swept up in prophecy until he becomes indifferent to the suffering he inflicts while trying to fulfill it. But with Mel Gibson behind the camera, we could expect a very different “Aeneid.” For 2,000 years, Westerners have viewed the “Aeneid” as, in some sense, their own origin story. If Aeneas hadn’t succeeded, then our civilization — so profoundly shaped by Rome — wouldn’t exist. The stakes are even higher for Christians. If God willed for his son to be born under Caesar Augustus, for the gospel to spread initially within the Roman Empire, and (in Catholic teaching) for the Church to be governed from the Eternal City, then Rome’s founding and rise must have been providentially ordained.  Gibson is the perfect director to emphasize this angle, not only because he’s a conservative and a Catholic, but also because he’s done it before. For most of its runtime, “Apocalypto” is a thrilling chase film set in a society so alien that, as far as the typical viewer is concerned, it might as well take place on another planet. That all changes in the film’s final minutes, in which the chase is interrupted by the arrival of Spanish ships with cross-emblazoned sails. Their arrival signals the end of human sacrifice and the eventual conversion of the Americas. This ending, in which world-historic forces impinge upon human drama in a way that foreshadows the providential triumph of the viewer’s own civilization, is positively Virgilian.  Gibson could do something similar with the “Aeneid.” Begin with the unfamiliar: foreign language dialogue, Bronze Age brutality, strange gods, and mysterious portents. Maybe even show the Carthaginians engaging in human sacrifice — a practice not mentioned in the poem but well attested historically. Then, amid all that unfamiliarity, drop hints that Aeneas’ predicament is our predicament, that his virtues are those to which we should aspire, that the hearth-fire he carried out of Troy still burns for us — until finally, an “Apocalypto”-style climax reveals him as a founding father of Western Civilization and Christendom. All that he suffered, he suffered on our behalf. An “Aeneid” like this would be unmistakably conservative without sacrificing mainstream appeal. It would be original rather than derivative. And for Elon Musk, it would be $100 million well spent. *** Grayson Quay is the author of “The Transhumanist Temptation” and a former editor at the Daily Caller. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Some parents are paying to avoid the hard parts of raising kids, and they don’t know what they’re missing. A viral Wall Street Journal article recently sparked controversy over wealthy parents who have outsourced as much as possible of their children’s lives to experts. Titled “When One Nanny Isn’t Enough, ‘CEO Parents’ Hire a Whole Team,” the article described parents who have hired nannies not only for the daytime hours, but also for the evenings and weekends. Some of these parents have retained experts to potty-train their children or teach them to ride bikes. According to Jordi Lippe-McGraw, who researched and wrote the piece, one mother said that she had never clipped her own children’s toenails because it made her too anxious. That same mother also usually delegates bath time to the nanny. Another mother said she was a “max-three-hour mum,” preferring to spend only weekend mornings with her children before moving on to other things. This mother believed she could outsource much of the drudgery of parenting, and, per Lippe-McGraw, rely “on a household team of nannies, cleaners, a chef and a chief of staff, which helps afford time for ‘high-impact, core memories’ like vacations with her children.” The author also reached out to me for insight, reporting my concerns over the this trend. She wrote that I worry “about what children might absorb from arrangements with hired help, whose presence they register and whose they miss.” In a fascinating coincidence, this reporting hit the headlines at the same time that Ben Sasse, a former Republican senator who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, was providing some hard lessons to the public. Sasse recently told CNN that his biggest regret was not spending more time with his kids. Reflecting on how much he traveled for work, Sasse said at the end of his many trips he would take all his hotel keys and throw them on the floor of his home office closet. “All of a sudden,” he said, “it became thousands and thousands of keys.” These boxes of keys in his office, according to Sasse, represented “a hell of a lot of missed dinners.” In thinking about his kids, Sasse regretfully concluded: “What the hell was I doing instead of being with you?” Without weighing in on the ideal work/life balance ratio for other families, I think Sasse’s words of wisdom should cause us all to think hard about what we are prioritizing over family life. It might seem attractive to outsource the difficult or annoying parts of parenting, and skim off only the joyful memories. But ultimately, this parenting approach fails to grapple with the fact that the hard parts of parenting are sometimes the most important and meaningful. I’m currently teaching my third child, a little girl, to read. I homeschool my three of my four children (the youngest is a toddler). I know from experience that literacy is a very long process. It begins with a child sitting on your lap as you read story after story. We started with board books, and now we’ve moved onto fairy tales, Doctor Seuss, and “Angelina Ballerina.” Until she learns to read for herself, my husband and I will read aloud hundreds of books to her, answering her many questions along the way: Do bears eat people? How does the baby kangaroo pop out of his mommy’s tummy? Why did the Little Ren Hen not share her cake? We are also working on letters now, slowly identifying all the capital letters (which she calls “Mommy” letters) and the lower case letters (which she calls “Baby” letters). She’s learned how to write the first letter of her name, which she does with significant pride. Eventually, we’ll start on blending sounds together, and eventually — probably in two or three years, if she follows the pattern of her older brothers — she’ll be reading her first books. This multi-year process is a lot of work for me. It’s not always delightful either. I know from my older sons that sometimes there are tears of frustration as we struggle through the difficulties of literacy in the complex English language. And don’t even get me started on teaching kids to spell. Once, when one of my older children and I were mutually at the end of our ropes over a spelling lesson, I printed out and read him “Our Strange Lingo,” a 1902 poem by Lord Cramer. The first stanza of the poem reads: When the English tongue we speak Why is break not rhymed with freak? Will you tell me why it’s true We say sew but likewise few? It would certainly be much easier to send the kids to school and let professional teachers handle the annoying job of correcting handwriting, making a child write comprehensible paragraphs, and insisting, yes, really, you must memorize your multiplication tables. Even the “eight times” tables.  And yet, there is something really special about all the hours I’ve logged teaching my kids. I’ve learned about my own characters, including my own need to develop more patience, more empathy, and also, sometimes, more firmness. I’ve learned a ton about our children as well. I’ve become deeply acquainted with all the areas in which they need more help, and those in which they naturally excel. I’ve had a front row seat to the explosion of this child’s incredible creativity, and witnessed the slow development of maternity and responsibility in that child. To be sure, I’ve sacrificed a lot as well. In particular, we would be much wealthier if I had kept my job as a corporate lawyer, rather than becoming a homeschooling mom with four kids. But I don’t regret it! The trade-offs have been well worth it. I’m certainly not trying to say that every parent needs to homeschool her child. Every family is different, and parents have different needs and gifts to offer. However, I can testify first-hand to the joys of thinking hard about “in-sourcing” when it comes to family life. To give another example: I’ve seen numerous hard-working fathers who dedicate many hours each week to coaching their children’s baseball or basketball teams, giving up relaxing time at home in order to instill the values of hard work, being a team player, and being a gracious loser. These dads could certainly have outsourced that job to another parent, or even to a professional (in the case of travel teams), but they find working hands-on with their children to be worth it. In my neighborhood, there are also several families that take a lot of pride in having the kids work (at least a little) in the family business, learning how to paint houses, do landscaping, or handle a business budget. Will all these kids end up working in construction or lawn care? Probably not, but the lessons learned from hands-on from their parents are invaluable anyway.  What these parents know, and what my husband and I know, is this: The most meaningful times with kids are usually not the Disney World trip or picking out the Instagram-worthy nursery decor (although those things can be very fun!). Instead, they are being the person who will get up with a puking child at 3 a.m. and make her feel loved even though she’s violently ill.  Sasse is extremely gracious to provide us all with the lessons he has learned through facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. I’m grateful for the reminder that at the end of my life, I probably won’t be counting up the money in our bank accounts or my professional accolades, but rather asking deeper questions. I personally know I still have more to do to get the balance closer to right, including reassessing how much time I spend on social media and how often I am short-tempered with the kids. But I deeply appreciate his assessment of the importance of thinking hard about these questions; when given by someone looking hard at his own mortality, it’s a lesson worth heeding. *** Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.