Bike Ridin' Dude

I tried and tried, but could not get this to embed, so I will give you the link and then you can download it. It's whooping big (20M, but I think it is worth every byte!!)

http://www.12degrees.org/images/blog/FamBlog/BlogPics/MVI_3302.AVI

The grandparents will want to download this, the rest of you can just look at the pictures below and get the gist of it.

I promised Luke to teach him how to ride his bike (which Santa got him for Christmas two years ago!!) and so tonight we went up to the church building to give him plenty of room to ride. I was prepared for a multi-trip process, but apparently he didn't think that was necessary. After about 5 minutes of "teaching", here are the results:



It would seem my only role is to cart his bike to the building. Happy to oblige!!

Funny stuff!

I hate to draw attention away from my two children who are pictured below inside dog carriers, but blogging must go on . . . !! :-)

Much thanks to all of you who responded to my "mommy guilt" post. You, also, have raised some valuable questions for me and offered insight from your own experiences as mothers and employees--that kind of wisdom is priceless. I haven't ditched the guilt yet (yes, Sarah, it does seem to be a mama "accessory"), but I will take your advice to live in the present and continue to love my children in every way that I
know how. Special thanks to my mother-in-law, Barbara, for the encouragement and the compliment; that meant a lot to me.

Now on to some funny things:

Grace apparently does not like humming. I sing to her every night (we have quite a repertoire of songs going), but last night I was really sleepy and the songs trailed off into a stream of humming. In the darkness, my quiet and almost asleep daughter YELLED, "Sing wif yous mouth! Singn wif yous mouth!" I cracked up, and quickly re-entered the world of lyrics.

Rob and I went out ON A DATE Friday night to celebrate our 13th anniversary. (If you're freaked out about the #13, it has always been a lucky number for me. Remember, my mailbox address at ACU was Box 6666, so clearly I am not afraid of "bad" numbers! :-)) Anyway, we try to go out once a year, whether we need to or not, so because of the infrequency of our dates, we don't really have the rules down--like how to prepare the babysitter, remembering to make reservations so all or our time isn't eroded in a crowded waiting area, etc.

Since we already messed up with the reservations thing, we decided to throw caution to the wind and try a new restaurant, hoping for some place quiet and dimly lit, and lo and behold, we enter a place that looks like a cross between the inside of campground lodge (complete with wood paneling and pine-topped tables) and Cheers, with the bar taking up over half of the sitting area, and beer and LOUD talking obscuring the sound of lumberjacks chopping down trees nearby (ok, just kidding there). We had to wait for our table for almost 45 minutes, which would have been a great time to visit with each other, except for the fact that we had to SHOUT over the noise to be heard.

I didn't, however, have any problem hearing the conversation of the man & wife nearby, who were loudly talking to each other and periodically, into her cell phone. I know about his workman's compensation claim, her daughter's facial tumor, the bad economy, what's wrong with the world at large, and her general disgust with just about everything. I felt really sorry for them--first, because between the two of them, they might have had enough teeth for one good set, and secondly, because they were both drinking alcohol from two of the biggest goblets I have ever seen, which seemed to sour their moods with every watery sip. Anyway, the wait and the above-mentioned conversation really set the mood for romance.

And on that note:
Happy belated anniversary, Rob! Thanks for the flowers and the date and for being my friend and my one and only for the last 13 years. I love you!
Jana

Caption this photo...

Here's your chance to provide a caption for this picture of our children - one who wants to be a dog, one who just wants a dog.

Mommy guilt

I'm starting to REALLY think about my classes this fall, so out comes the white legal pad, my new textbooks, lots of colored pens, and my zip drive, all of which get parked in front of the computer, with hopes that creative ideas will begin to appear somewhere in this vicinity.

The other thing I take out with all of my equipment is my guilt. I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but right now, this is not a choice I/we can make without creating a whole host of other problems that don't have any visible solutions. So that's that.

So I pull out the guilt again tonight, and I look at it squarely in the face, and I don't really know what to do with it or how to put it away. It is this guilt that makes each teaching day hard for me--it's not the work, or the endless piles of essays to grade, or the committee meetings, or student conferences. The hard part is the feeling I have that I am short-changing my children, especially my daughter.
I'm getting that sinking feeling in my chest even as I write this, because I know that days of summer are numbered, and off we will go in separate directions in about 3 weeks.

I happened upon this blog article at www.5minutesforparenting and it provided another perspective for me tonight. I'm going to think about what she is saying over the next few days. Here is her post:

July 15, 2008
If Every Mom Were a Stay-At-Home Mom

By Veronica

If every mom were a stay-at-home mom, the public schools would shut down due to a lack of teachers.

If every mom were a stay-at-home mom, giving birth would become much more dangerous. All those mothers who are midwives and OBGYNS would disappear. The hospitals could not staff enough nurses for basic patient care. The pregnant women who already must drive twenty miles to a birth unit might have to drive fifty.

If every mom were a stay-at-home mom, I would lose my pediatrician. My kids would go farther and wait longer to see a doctor. My sister's clients - children with neurological disorders - would spend years on waiting lists before seeing another physical therapist who specializes in their treatment.

If every mom were a stay-at-home mom, some of the most brilliant scholars I know would not be available to affect the lives and minds of students. My children's future education would be immeasurably the poorer.

This stay-at-home mom has one thing to say to the moms who leave home to earn a paycheck at a job worth doing: thank you. Thank you for caring for patients and protecting citizens. Thank you for repairing our streets and driving our buses and picking up our garbage. Thank you for writing our newspapers and teaching our kids. Thank you for being an example to my daughters of the many options they have in adult life. Thank you for making my decision to be a stay-at-home mom a real choice.

The media-manufactured "Mommy Wars" tell us that mothers resent and judge each other. Sometimes we do. But sometimes we recognize that the world needs different people to make different choices. The truth is that as we all struggle to provide the best for our kids, we can't make it without each other. Your choices affect me, and mine affect you. We really are all in this together.

So the next time a belittling feature on a morning news program tries to exploit you emotionally; the next time a snooty mom at play group or school treats you like you are just a "part-time" mom; the next time you feel isolated and unappreciated in the challenges you face, please, come back and read this thank you again.

Because it will still be true.

Veronica Mitchell also posts at Toddled Dredge.

I'd like to know what you all think. Please post.
Jana

Dead Dogs

It's been a sad day around here.

The boy is sick, and on top of that, he just finished the last chapters of Where the Red Fern Grows. Maybe I should have gently warned him about the ending. But after a summer of reading dog books like Old Yeller, Stone Fox, and A Dog Named Kitty (all the dogs die in the end), the dam burst and the tears just wouldn't stop.

He sobbed for at least 15 minutes, and despite my best attempts, and my reminders that these books are FICTION, he was inconsolable. "Why, why do all the dogs die in the end? Why couldn't he write it differently? Why? It's just not right that the dog always has to die." As he cried, he added, "This is why everybody doesn't have a dog; people just can't take stuff like this."

Poor guy. (Addendum: we don't have a dog because we/I don't want to be that responsible for a living thing who isn't human. That and the whole "messed up back yard" thing. Yes, we are no fun. And . . . my apologies to dog lovers everywhere who know their dogs ARE human).

The tears have finally stopped, but I'll think I'll steer him toward something lighter in future days. If it was appropriate, I'd have him read a book titled, No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman. It's a pretty funny tween book, and the basic premise is about a middle-school boy who refuses to write a report on a book titled Old Shep because he has HAD IT with reading books about dead dogs. You adult readers would get a kick out of it.

To what books have your kids had a strong emotional reaction?

Jana

Quick Update!

The family is home. (That noise you hear is great rejoicing!!) They got home a few minutes after I did this evening from work. Long trip - Lubbock to Vernon to College Station to Montgomery to CS to Waco to Vernon to Lubbock. They need a break!

I am extremely glad they are home and thankful for God's mercies on their travels.

Tonight we had a ballgame. (As if enough had not already transpired today!!) I had taken the camera to get some "action shots," but ended up the dugout coach (read: Master Sargent who keeps the kids sitting down in their right spot and somehow up to bat in the right order - which I messed up on tonight!) so I was having to take shots from just inside the dugout and only of Luke batting.

On the at bat pictured below, I was shooting, but watching him "live" instead of looking through the LCD. On this pitch, the coach threw the ball and his eyes suddenly got real big. It was so visible that he had locked in on the pitch and was ready to smack it. And he did!! I was proud of him and enjoyed watching the light come on! I was also glad I managed to capture it on film (silicon chip??)

A message for my wife and kids...

...who are in Vernon and beyond seeing family.

Luke and his pet

I found a baby praying mantis today and was photographing it, when Luke saw me and decided to "adopt" a pet.


Jana just happened to have a Critter Crate he was able to build and now his pet has a new home. I thought this one of him working was especially cute. Extreme concentration!

The optimist vs. the pessimist

Research shows that it's not what happens to you that determines your mood, but how you explain what happens to you that counts.

The article I read said this:
"If an optimist encounters a computer program she can't figure out, she's likely to say, 'Either the manual is unclear, or this program is hard, or maybe I'm having an off day.' The optimist keeps the failure outside herself ('the manual'), keeps it specific ('this program'), and keeps it temporary ('an off day'), while the pessimist would make the problem internal, global, and permanent.

When success occurs, optimists say, 'Of course dinner turned out great; I'm a good cook,' while the pessimist would say, 'Boy, I got lucky today,' literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."

This difference in explanation, according to the author, is the key difference between the optimist and the pessimist.

What do you think?

Jana

To You, With Love

When I read a book, I am just as interested in the dedication page (or the "My Thanks To" page or sometimes the Afterword) as I am in the book itself.

It doesn't matter what kind of book I pick up--I first look to see who it is being dedicated to, and this little piece of information gives me a peek into the writer's world and into what/who she thinks has made a significant contribution into her life and the life of the book.

I am now randomly grabbing 5 books off the shelf, and here is what this sampling reveals:

Some dedication pages are simple: "To Lisa."

Some are longer:

"To Rich, Madeleine, and Wanda, who now dance and sing in heavenly places."

"To my wife Janet, who manages to tolerate with grace the neuroses that seem endemic to those who make a living by the introverted task of writing."

Some are more cryptic: "To Andrew, who has dared to cross the drawbridge."

Some are wise: "Thanks above all to my family. Now I understand what Katherine Paterson meant when she said, 'The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say'."

The weirdest dedication page I've seen recently caught my attention last week. Luke was reading an Amelia Bedelia chapter book, and inside on the front page, the dedication read: "To Belinda, my lover." Somehow, that just didn't seem right inside a children's book!

Finally: I may have to write a book someday just so I can construct a dedication page. Anyone else like these little writing gems?

Jana

Blogging

Some people just don't get the blogging thing. But apparently, blogging is good medicine for the human spirit. Read on:


From Newsweek:

Why do people write confessional blogs? It's a creative outlet. It's a forum to vent. It's an exercise in exhibitionism. To mental-health experts, though, it's more than that: a blog is medicine. Psychiatrists are starting to tout the therapeutic power of blogging, and many have begun incorporating it into patient treatment. A forthcoming study in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior even suggests that bloggers might be happier than nonbloggers.

What do you think about that? Agree? Disagree?

Jana

On Prayer

During this season of spiritual dryness, one spiritual discipline has experienced the worst indifference: prayer. I want to pray, I intend to pray, I think about thinking about praying, but the words seem to get stuck in my throat and I find myself increasingly distracted from this privilege of prayer, which has become to feel like a duty rather than a relationship.

I seized upon Philip Yancey's book, titled Prayer, as a place for help. I bought the book when I read this on the flap: "If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where these themes converge." Bingo. I'm mad because I can't get my act together, and I wonder why He won't intervene in my friend's marriage that has fallen apart, or cured another friend's mother of brain cancer, or healed all the brokenness I see around and in me. And yet I know that I must trust God--in prayer--with what God already knows.

This book has been a breath of fresh air and feels like God's mercy poured in living streams into dying places. Please, please read it.

And finally: from Karl Rahner, in The Need and Blessing of Prayer, on those daily, sometimes monotonous, one-sided prayers we offer:

Oh, everyday prayer! You are poor and a little tattered and the worse for wear like the everyday itself. August thoughts and exalted feelings are difficult for you. You are not an exalted symphony in a great cathedral, but more like a devout song, well-intended and coming from the heart, a little monotonous and naive. But, prayer of the everyday, you are the prayer of loyalty and reliability, the prayer of selfless, unrewarded service to the divine majesty, you are the dedication which makes the gray hours light and the trivial moments great. You don't ask about the experience of the one praying, but about the honor of God. You don't want to experience something; you want to believe. Your gait may sometimes be weary, but you still walk. Sometimes you may appear to come just from the lips and not from the heart. But isn't it better that at least the lips are blessing God than when the entire human being becomes mute? And isn't there more hope then that the sound from the lips will find an echo in the heart than when everything in man remains mute? And in our prayer-poor times, what one chides oneself or others for as lip-prayer is most often in reality the prayer of a poor but loyal heart that honestly, in spite of all weakness, weariness, and inner discontent, is at least continuing to dig a small shaft through which a small ray of the eternal light falls into the heart that is buried by the everyday."

Jana

Remembering Monday . . .

Yesterday had Monday written all over it.

After a hard rain Sunday night, the back yard had several mud pits, which both children found particularly alluring. I'm really ok with playing in the mud, as long as it doesn't attach itself to anything they are wearing and come tromping through my house.

I forgot to warn/remind them. In came the mud, and it left its cakey footprints in a circle around the living room, through the kitchen, and into my bedroom. I sighed, muttered something under my breath about mud and children, and then commenced to cleaning it up.

A few hours later, Grace cut her toe on something (we still don't know what) on the living room floor (it could be a number of things, since I let Luke make tents from our card tables in the living room floor, and he filled both with piles of "tent-stuff" from his room). It was a small cut, but it produced blood drops across the living room floor, landing on the carpet, several books, Luke's sleeping bag, and down the front of my jeans. Once I consoled and bandaged her toe, and set her to happily invading one of Luke's tents, I sighed, muttered something under my breath about blood and children, and started cleaning up. One big drop landed on one of her fuzzy animal books; after vigorous cleaning, the poor fluffy chicken still looks like he's been in a hen-fight. I think I'll put a band-aid on him.

Both children were generally out of sorts all day, and between feeding them, cleaning them, and issuing lectures on why you don't grab things from your sister and why you don't squeal at the top of your lungs at your brother, I decided that it was just a Monday. You just have to laugh.

Yesterday's celebrations:
Happy Anniversary to my older sister and brother-in-law! 18 years of wedded bliss and two children later, these two are still having a lot of fun together! Of all the weddings I have been to, there day was one of the happiest and most fun ones that I remember. Lots of great people, two happy sets of parents and siblings, terrific music, yummy food, and just a plain-ol-good-time. We had the poofy 80's hair, the floral dresses with the narrow waists and the humongous shoulder pads (my sister and I kept Leslie Lucks in business through the years), and lots of pink lipstick. We were looking good! Happy anniversary to two of my favorite people--I love you!

And happy birthday to two of my favorite little people; twins Jared and Jordan Walla celebrated their birthday yesterday, and we celebrated right along with them. We hope you had a super-fun day--we'll never forget the Mario Brothers or PikMin (sp)or your love for collecting little things. We love you guys!

Happy Tuesday to you in blogland!
Jana