No Grasp of Your Reality

Aiden has learned to climb in and out of his pack-n-play crib.

We have a second pack-n-play in the living room and, this morning, I walked into the living room and there he was playing with his toys in the playpen. Hmm… I didn’t put him in there!

And then, after his nap this afternoon, he just showed up downstairs.

I wonder if he’ll stay in his bed at bedtime? Highly unlikely!

For Thomas and Tabitha, the thrill of escaping seemed to take precedence over getting in trouble for not staying in bed.

At the time Thomas learned to escape from his crib, we lived in an apartment. We got a surprise visit from our neighbor, who brought Thomas back after finding him wandering around the hallway. He had not only climbed out of bed, but had opened the front door and let himself out while I was naively resting.

Another time, I woke up about 3am to the sound of a toilet flushing. Tom was still asleep next to me, so I was a little scared for a moment. Cautiously, I walked into the bathroom, and there was Thomas, age 1 1/2, naked and flushing his clothing down the toilet.

Needless to say, these events led to us installing a latch on the outside of his bedroom door.

In the past few months, there have been discussions going on in certain circles about Christian marriage, and specifically about prenuptial agreements and whether they are ever appropriate in a Christian marriage.

In my studies of Scripture, I’ve concluded that prenuptual agreements are not only permissible, but would actually be wise for an engaged couple. This conclusion is based on the nature of marriage in scripture, and the relationship of both the church and civil governments to the marriage covenant.
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I love reading women’s magazines. Okay, back up. I love life and I am inspired by its every aspect. I love to hear about what other people think, feel, and do. I love it, especially, when hearing about the stories and ideas of women, in particular, motivates me to respond in some way – and the response it inspires isn’t always because I agree with what I have just read.
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album05/IMG_0421Aiden fell down this morning. Anyone who knows my son also knows that falling down is not newsworthy enough to write about. This was different.

When I came in the backdoor after taking the trash out this morning, Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table with Aiden in her lap and tears in her eyes. Aiden was sitting quietly with a big bruise on his head.

Sarah told me that he fell down the steps, flipping a couple times, and hitting his head hard at least three times. She ran down to see if he was ok, and he didn’t cry… he just lay there staring.
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Never one to be satisfied with anything, I was up until 1am changing the layout of the weblog. I decided to go with a three-column layout, so the left side was less cluttered. Sarah and I wanted to make the site more interesting, so we’re to going to try to keep more images in the text. Instead of random images from our photo gallery, you’ll now see the most recent images added.

Please us know what you think in the comments…

PicsOfKids/110_1006Just wanted to test adding pictures to our blog entries. It looks like it’s simply a matter of a few clicks, copy and paste a filename, and we’ll see what happens. Here is a nice picture of Thomas and Tabitha, at one of their more pleasant times. Thank God for cameras, that we can capture these fleeting moments.

UPDATE: Nice! After achieving only a slight headache, I was able to incorporate images into the blog using a simple script. I’ll probably spend a little time going back to some old posts referencing pictures and adding their images to the posts.

“To say that someone is a conservative does not tell us what he is interested in conserving. Within our lifetimes, we have seen hard line communists trying to conserve the Soviet Union, fanatical Muslims trying to conserve ancient Islamic traditions, and American right-wingers trying to conserve the rich heritage of ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ The word in itself does not communicate very much” (Doug Wilson, Angels in the Architecture, p. 110).

I’ve been reading over George W. Bush’s inauguration speech he gave on Thursday. After reading it, I think I’m starting to understand why so many evangelicals like him, and why he really grates me the wrong way. Over and over, Bush used words like “freedom” and “liberty” (27 and 15 times, respectively), yet he never really defines them. This allows the listener to define the words however they choose.
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This week, at the high recommendation of some close friends, we made the brave move to take our children to a new pediatrician.

Not only was the practice awesome (excellent medical (and gentle) care, smaller practice, kid-friendly environment) , but the doctor gave us a sample of ElixSure for our children’s non-stop coughing from their illness.

Wow! It works fast, and it has the consistency of a soft jello (sticks to the spoon, too) – so it doesn’t get all over the place when administering it to children, and it actually tastes delicious. (Have you ever tried a cough medicine that tastes good? I always taste a smidgen of the medicine my children take so that I know what they’re in for - I’m not going to lie if it tastes horrible!)

When our children took the medicine, it reminded me of the scene in Mary Poppins where she gives Jane and Michael medicine after “getting their feet wet” in the rain and the children are surprised when it actually tastes good.

ElixSure Cough (which retails at CVS $5.99) for is made by Taro Pharmaceuticals and if the world catches on to their new line of tasty spill-resistant cold medicines, their stock will be nothing to cough (or sneeze) at.

Winter-2004/brownmouseThe other night, while the ladies were at our house for Bible study, Tabitha, who has a terrible cold, decided she no longer wanted her lemonade. Not wanting to waste a cup of lemonade, she poured it back into the main pitcher.

I grabbed the pitcher and put it in the kitchen before anyone else could have a drink.
As I walked into the kitchen, a brown mouse was nibbling on the remaining, uncut, Magic Cookie Bars. As I stepped closer, he ran away.

Not wanting to alarm anyone, I quietly scraped the cookie bars into the trash. One of the ladies came in as I was doing this and said, “You’re not going to save those?” I smiled and said, “NOPE!”

That night, we set a mousetrap and baited it with peanut butter.

The next morning, all of the peanut butter was neatly licked off of the trap - but the trap had not been tripped.

We set it again.

This morning, we got our fat brown mouse.

Our society is collapsing around us. Basic concepts of civilization have slowly eroded to the point where we have simply lost any sense of intelligence as a whole.

Proof of this lies on the wrapper of a bag of sunflower seeds sitting in front of me. The wrapper says on the front, “Eating Instructions: Crack Open Shells, Discard Shells, Enjoy the Seeds!”

Pardon me while I weep for a culture that needs instructions for sunflower seeds.

Rainbow over Indonesia
Rainbow over Sumatra Islands
Rainbow over tsunami relief supply station

Genesis 9:8-17 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you-the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you-every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

Bill Gates. Teen Beat Magazine. ‘nough said.
(via BoingBoing)

Turns out, the photos were real, but the attibution was wrong. According to Snopes, they were publicity photos for the release of Microsoft Windows 1.0. The original subject was “Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA.”

Yesterday, Sarah and I met with the Judicial Commission from Heritage Presbytery over our recent complaints. It was difficult for me to imagine it possible for anything but a decisive answer to come from the Commission, so it surprises me now to say that I really have no idea how it went.

Of course, if success could be measured by the number of photocopies made, it was an extremely successful meeting.
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Q: How many RIAA lawyers does it take to screw in a light blub?

A: We at the RIAA think we will never really know, as we are fairly sure that each lightbulb changed by a home internet user represents a lost lightbulb installation fee, which in turn affects not just the RIAA lawyers but the Lighting Technicians and Carpenters and all the little people involved in lightbulb production to such an extent that we now have to over-task our lawyers to combat the menace of the Open Standard Lightbulb Organizations. The pressure generated by these OSLOs, in turn, prevents us from determining the natural lawyer to lightbulb ratio. Until Congress acts to plug this fee-structure leakage with an appropriate rights management technology and enacts proper criminal penalties for circumvention of our natural right to control the exercise of the lightbulb changing task, we will be forced to file John Doe lawsuits in order to gain the suppoena power necessary to compel the lightbulb supply corporations with the names and addresses of their clearly infringing customers.