No Grasp of Your Reality

I woke up this morning, and found out my new baby daughter had set up a myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/poopiegurl06

Leah’s doing fantastic!

She’s eating well, very alert and much loved by her siblings.

Everyone is asking “does she sleep through the night?”

Um, no.

Newborns do NOT sleep through the night.
Newborns eat and poop through the night.

But, these things indicate that she is thriving and I don’t mind waking up every two hours.

However, I think Alarm Clock Duty needs to be delegated as, in my stupor, I tend to hit the “Alarm Off” button and immediately fall back asleep. (The outlet is on my side of the bed.) Poor Tom’s been waking up to the morning heart attack of, “Crap! You have TEN MINUTES before you have to leave for work! I must have hit “OFF” again! SO SORRY!”

Today I am celebrating because I’m comfortably wearing my regular jeans!

I’m sure most of you know already, but since I’ve been lax keeping the website up-to-date, here’s my “We had a baby!” post. Leah Grace Albrecht was born on Wednesday, September 20, at 2:35am. She was 7lb 13oz, and mother and baby are doing well.

We also got the pictures online for everyone to appreciate. Thanks to the friends and family for the support and meals.

Excerpt on Evangelism from John Piper (For complete text of the sermon “The Fruit of Hope: Love” and other Piper sermons, click on Piper’s name):

In summary, direct the attention of your mind day and night to the word of God’s promises, seek in all humility the help of the Holy Spirit to see the wonder of what is really there, and, as Peter says, “Set your hope fully on the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:13).

And by the grace of God the result will be the visible fruit of love.
This means:

• We will be more patient, more kind.
• We will be less jealous, and boastful and arrogant and rude.
• We will not just seek our own advancement but will strive to do to others what we would have them do to us.
• We will not be so irritable.
• We won’t be so prone to keep an account of wrongs or return evil for evil.
• We will be inclined to bear all things and endure all things for the sake of our neighbor.
• We will not speak about our neighbor’s faults without first going to the neighbor ourselves.
• We will return good for evil, and use our discretionary time not by maximizing our fleeting comforts but by devising ways to be a blessing to the lost and suffering.
• More and more our whole lives will take on an overflowing and other-directed spirit.

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Two weeks ago, my wife let me purchase a Nintendo DS for something to keep me busy during my long flights overseas. Today, I completed the New Super Mario Brothers games. By defeated, I mean I earned three stars by beating the game, grabbing and spending every gold coin, and defeating every level (including alternate exits). I am truly master of the mundane.

I took the day off of work and took the family to the zoo yesterday. As I was getting my camera stuff together, I remembered that we still had our old A300 digital camera. So, for fun, I put new batteries in the camera, cleared out the little 32mb memory card, and gave Thomas a quick lesson on how to use it. It’s not the best camera in the world, but for his purposes, it worked out well.

I was very suprised at some of the pictures he took. While the skill in even holding the camera level is obviously lacking, his eye for composition is definately there. I turned and saw him eyeing this picture for a while, and it came out really well. It’s also interesting to see what he finds worthy of a picture.

Anyway, take a flip through the photo album I put together for him, and see if you agree that I have a budding photographer on my hands.

A couple months ago, I came across an interesting concept on the Internet, and now that I’ve got a little bit of money to play with, I’m considering looking into it.

The website is prosper.com, and the idea is what they call “people-to-people lending”. The concept is that banks make a lot of money lending to customers, and they’re trying to get those profits into the hands of normal people.

Let’s say I wanted to borrow $5,000 to purchase a motorcycle. I would log onto Prosper and fill out the normal information that a borrow needs to fill out to get a loan. Prosper will then perform a credit check and assign a person a “rating”, from “AA” to “E”. There are also two other categories called “HR” for high risk, and “NC” for those with no credit.

After I’ve created my account, I then put up a listing (here’s an example), where I state that I’d like to borrow a certain amount at a certain interest rate, to be repaid over a certain amount of time. Then, other Prosper users will bid on my listing. No one person will put up the $5,000, but individuals will put up smaller chunks, from $50, up to maybe $200. If I want to be sure that the person takes my money, I might lower the interest rate from 10% to 9.8%.

The rates online are better than cd’s, and although there is some risk in the loans, since they’re spread out over multiple borrowers, it lowers the risk of the investment. A friend of mine at work has been doing this for a few months and has seen a consistant 14% return on his loans.

I’ll let you know it turns out…

While I like to encourage toddlers to eat without help, a problem they seem to have is gaging how much food to put in their mouth while taking a bite. I know from experience that it’s certainly not cool to have to stick a finger into the mouth of a gagging shark to try to retrieve half a sandwich.

Here’s a tip to help them with their eating independence:

When making sandwiches, use scissors to snip the sandwich into bite-size pieces.

I like this method because:

• it’s less tedious than when using a serrated knife for the same task
• you don’t need a cutting board (yet another dish to wash) - just hold the sandwich in your hand
• it’s FAST.

To make about 1/2 inch sized cubes, I cut the sandwich into rectangles and then cut the short side into strips, almost all the way to the crust. It resembles paper “fringe” for a craft project. Then, cut the “fringe” in half going lengthwise (detaching the pieces from the sandwich into cubes). Next, snip the remaining strips all the way through the crust.

This method works well with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or other types of sandwiches with a moist filling (like finely cut chicken or tuna fish salad, egg salad, etc.).

It only works with meat and cheese sandwiches if there is “glue” involved, like mayonaise or mustard. An extra “glue” layer between the meat and the cheese and pressing down on the sandwich prior to snipping are tricks to making meat and cheese sandwiches hold together.

Here’s some PB&J trivia from Wikipedia to share with your kiddies while preparing their lunch:

Both peanut butter and jelly were packed with United States Army K-rations in World War II. The combination proved so popular that returning GIs made peanut butter and jelly a standard American food… Peanut butter and jelly has been available in the military instant food Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) for many years. The sandwich can survive in the field for up to three years.

For more on the invention of the sandwich, including their how they got their namesake after the Earl of Sandwich, click here.

Hooray for cooler weather!

“Red alert. Put the kettle on!”

Instead of my usual coffee (which can be spiced up by mixing a dash of cinnamon with the grounds before brewing – thanks to my friend Sarah for this tip!), I made a steamy mug of Stash’s Double Spice Chai Black Tea. The flavor of the tea made me want to bake some biscotti! (My own not-so-secret recipe is posted here in the NGoYR archives.)

In my In-Box this morning was a note from Carolyn McCulley. Even though I am happily married, it is important to me to understand and build relationships with women of all ages and stages of life. McCulley, who is unmarried, has a wonderful way of encouraging single (and married!) women in the Lord. She works with Sovereign Grace Ministries and authored “Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye:Trusting God with a Hope Deferred.”

I had asked her opinion of Debbie Maken’s book “Getting Serious About Getting Married: Rethinking the Gift of Singleness.” The Canon Press bookstore now carries title, and Nancy’s Wilson’s review can be found here. McCulley is now penning some thoughts on book to be posted on her blog, Solo Femininity. I look forward to reading her review.

Boundless, a Focus on the Family webzine for the college and career crowd, recently published an article by McCulley entitled, “You Made Me Sin”.

It’s easy sin by holding others in contempt, running them down (disobeying Ephesians 4:29) and by justifying yourself by saying that it’s not your fault, because the person deserved your tongue lashing. (James 1:19-20 comes to mind here.)

I love this article because in it, McCulley gets to the heart of this sort of blame shifting, citing Dr. David Powlison’s analogy of the sponge.

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