News and Views

Warmist Joe Romm of Climate Progress considered a dishonest bully and a McCarthyist, but his fellow warmists. Part II, and Part III are also good reading, as is part IV. In fact, if you are given to the dishonest mental shortcut of dismissing somebody with whom you disagree with 'That's a Fox news talking point' ( deliciously ironic since that is itself a Progressive talking point), you might read part III with special attention and close self-examination.

McDonald's vs San Francisco- remember when SF banned Happy Meals? What they did was to require that fruits and veggies be served with any meal requiring a toy. Because it's so much better to throw food away, and because parents can't be trusted. Previously, McD's did have an option where the customer could choose a side of fruits or veggies instead of fries with a Happy Meal. McDonald's no longer includes toys or fruits and veggies with their Happy Meals. If you want the toy you buy it separately, for a nominal fee which they donate to the Ronald McDonald Houses. Thanks to the law, McDonalds cannot just permit the separate purchase of the toy sans Happy Meal (which you could do before).
As AllahPundit says, "I can’t shake the feeling that government intrusion produces higher costs, less choice, and inefficiency. "
More here. And this point about the city regulating private businesses while school lunches continue to serve chicken nuggets and pizzas is ironic.


Hundreds of green industries, solar companies (all highly subsidized by taxpayers, no doubt) to go out of business, predicts CNN.

What other climate scientists really think of Mann's (of hockey stick infamy) work, but haven't the courage to tell the public.

Proposed EPA regulations will make our power supply unreliable.

The British Embassy in Tehran stormed by students or 'students.'

Crony Capitalism:

"It's fair to suggest that, by and large, members of Congress focus on three things: regulation, taxes and the federal budget," Ziobrowski told the Financial Times. "All three of those things can have a tremendous impact on corporate profitability and if you are the first one to know that the law is about to change, you can make an awful lot of money."

And of course, Congress isn't just the first to know, they are the deciders. They determine whether or not the law will be changed, and this has become an obvious conflict of interest. They should not be permitted to buy or sell stocks while in office at all, because for them, it's all insider trading.  Remove their ability to profit from the laws they pass.  This is why it also ought to be obvious that OWS' focus on Wall Street is so misguided- they are many miles downstream from the source of the pollution.

As always, the Gates of Vienna Newsfeed is an excellent source for headlines for your student's news notebooks.

Of Charles Williams and Peanut Butter

Williams’s best novel is entitled Descent into Hell. Here we watch a perfectly unnoticeable and respectable historian damn himself to Hell by an unremitting sequence of very small petulant choices. Nothing big. But again and again and again he will not have the Way of Exchange—My Life for Yours. At one point, it comes down to his merely having to say yes or no to some folks who are putting on a play, and who need his historical acumen to tell them whether they’ve got the costumes right. But he refuses out of sheer testiness.

Well, says Williams, if I will have it that way, then I will have it that way—forever. Naturally we all say in chorus, “George Macdonald! The Great Divorce!” And we are right, of course: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” Williams likes to call Hell Gomorrah: the place beyond the city where I seek the mirror image of myself (Sodom), where I may be altogether alone with no one to get in my hair.

Read more: http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-10-033-f#ixzz1f9j1IPZs

With fear and trepidation and a little bit of shock at my audacity, I am going to disagree ever so slightly with Thomas Howard, the scholar who knows far more about Williams than I know about myself.

The only reason I dare is because I just finished the book, and Wentworth's descent into Hell through a chain of small, often petulant, selfish- it's not even possible to always call them choices- struck me in the same way Lewis' Screwtape Letters did. It made me feel uncomfortable and revealed my own small, petty nonchoices for what they are far too clearly..

Because of this series of nonchoices, Wentworth is essentially deceived, yet willingly and willfully, by a succubus, which, no, that's not my problem. Then again, neither is it Wentworth's only problem, and it's not even the root problem. The root is his selfish desire for one thing- in his case, a girl, in my case it might be 'only' privacy, or to finish a book, or not to have scrub the toilet today. The desires vary, the specifics of the mess we get ourselves into vary, but the steps are terribly (and I do mean terribly) the same.

He did not exactly will, but he refused to avoid. Why, indeed, he had once asked himself, swiftly, almost thoughtlessly, should he avoid? He asked himself no more; he sighed, and as it were, nestled back into himself...

It is true that the majority of the choices that carry him downward, "farther in, farther in down under, down under" are selfish acts, usually of a refusal to, in any way, inconvenience himself in that 'substitution and exchange' that is part of Williams' world, and really, part of the human contract.

...anyone familiar with his work will not get very far in speaking of it all before he brings up “Substitution and Exchange.” Any Christian, of course, is on home turf here. In the mystery of the Atonement, the Son of God in some sense “stood in” for the rest of us, bearing our sins in his own body on the tree (cf. Isaiah 53, and Sts. Peter, Paul, and John).

This mystery is itself an epiphany of the blissful exchanges that obtain amongst the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The Son “gives” himself to the Father, and vice-versa, and the Holy Ghost is, in a mystery, the “agent” of those exchanges. My life for yours: Somehow that maxim, raised to the nth degree, may be said to touch, remotely, to be sure, on at least one aspect of the Godhead. Calvary is the epiphany in our world of that same principle. The Son gave himself for us.

And here we come into Williams country. Every one of his seven novels has this mystery for its animating energy.

(Read more: http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-10-033-f#ixzz1f9zsMJis)

But the issue of the costumes, I think, is something slightly more than mere testiness.  

The local community is putting on a play, and he, as an expert historian, was asked to design the costumes. He does, and then at a dress rehearsal he is asked to come and tell them if the costumes for the Guard is correct. It is not, and he recognizes this instantly. To say so, however, might require that he give up an evening with his succubus (or my book, or the internet, or with your favorite television show, video game, night out with the girls, and any of a hundred other things which aren't wrong, but which can, all of them, become a wrong, become an idol, become that vile thing, a succubus).

He could, if he chose, satisfy and complete everything. He could have the coats left at his house after the rehearsal; he could do what the honour of his scholarship commanded; he could have them returned. It meant only his being busy with them that one evening, and concerning himself with something different from his closed garden. He smelt the garden.

Mrs. Parry's voice said: "Is the Guard correct?" He said: "Yes." It was over; he could go.

He had decided.

It wasn't just his usual self-centered choice, it was a choice that violated the person that ought to have been his core self in Williams' book- the honest scholar. It's not mere testiness, it's the addict sacrificing his integrity, his soundness on some issue that once was an integral part of his self on the altar of his idol. It's an exchange of the counterfeit for the real, the true, and the good.

A young friend posted on Facebook recently, "A man is not made in crisis, he is revealed in crisis." I think it's a paraphrase of this by Robert Freeman:
"Character is not made in a crisis it is only exhibited."

But character is also both made and exhibited in the small choices we make a hundred times a day.

I am talking about minutia like the choice to change a diaper with cheerful love or resentment, to do it now, or thirty minutes from now, to clean a toilet that needs cleaning, to prepare a meal with love, or with bitterness of heart or impatience, to choose the crunchy or the smooth peanut butter because you prefer one and your spouse the other, to read a book instead of folding the laundry, to surf the internet one more time instead of making a holiday decoration with your children, to turn down the other aisle of a grocery store to avoid the gregarious, long winded, and somewhat embarrassing old lady who will tell you of her female troubles in a voice only the aged deaf imagine is subtle, to answer or to ignore the phone when you know it is the needy, tedious friend calling,to choose the clever, witty response instead of the gentle, kind one, to offer a ride even when it out of your way, or to choose not to hear the request ...

It's not that none of those choices are ever the right choices, that any single time you choose one instead of the other, you're heading to hell, or at least hellishness. There are times when it is the best thing to ignore the phone call, to slip down a different aisle, and times when it is utterly neutral which peanut butter we choose.  But if we are honest with ourselves, we know that sometimes even the seemingly neutral, trivial, utterly banal decision of which peanut butter you buy is based on a dark and secret selfishness.

The choices are subtle, some of them may even seem silly, but the path to habitual selfishness, the descent into hell or hellishness is made of small, seemingly isolated acts that make up a pattern- and that pattern is ourselves.

"Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper."

The source of this statement? Stephen King.


Currently reading his book The Stand.
Not going to recommend it per se, and if in fact you are unmarried The Equuschick strongly encourages you *not* to read it and there's been a page or two she just flipped past entirely, but she is not going to lie either and say that she is sorry for reading such a Story.

Whatever else you can say about Stephen King, there are some things he understands about the nature of life and death and morality itself that many so-called believers choose willfully to misunderstand.

The Equuschick is not going to call him pro-life because (a) she is pretty certain he would object and because (b) she is not sure it would be entirely accurate.

The dark man of "The Stand", the man that Mother Abagail calls the Imp of Satan, haunts the dreams of all of the everyday folk of Stephen King's world. They each see him a bit differently as he filters through the subconsciousness of their past experiences and present hopes and fears.

And when a pregnant woman in a best-selling novel is haunted by recurring nightmares of being chased by a cloaked man carrying a twisted wire coat-hanger, The Equuschick believes it might be accurate to say that the author of such a novel is at least (whether he acknowledges it or not) anti-death. And he is willing to stand up and say (at least in cloaked symbolism) that's what abortion is- death. And not just death, because cells die every day and where's the harm in that, but the death of a human. A tiny piece of humanity itself.

There is a long discussion this young unwed mother has with her father where she asks him what he would think if she had an abortion. Many Christians I would disagree with his answer and the reasons he gives for it and while The Equuschick would venture to say there is *more* to say than Stephen King's answer, at least part of the answer he puts in the mouth of his creation Mr. Goldsmith is an answer that she believes Christians need to stop being ashamed of. In fact, the only thing The Equuschick thinks Mr. Goldsmith did wrong was imply that he *was* ashamed of the answer he gave.

"Abortion is too clean a word for it...I think it's infanticide, pure and simple. I'm sorry to say so, to *be* so inflexible, set, whatever it is I'm being...about something which you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it...I'm an old man trying to give a young daughter advice and it's like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son's life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I've always seen abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way...your mother would argue against it for all of the standard reasons. Morality, she'd say... the right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I've read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in a Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader's Digest, but it is me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. Those right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what think...these things are so often based on arbitrary judgements when they are right. I can't get over that. It's like a block in my throat, how all logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith."

THERE. That's it. Read that last line again and face the FACT of faith. No matter what train of logic we choose to ride, we choose to ride upon an underlying track and the track we choose is our faith.

The Equuschick is weary of answering fools according to their folly as we endlessly debate questions like "When does life begin" and "what does life mean" and "what makes man different from beast, anyway?"

A long time ago a man named Moses asked a voice in a burning bush who it was that was speaking and the only answer he got was I Am. This same I Am made humans in that mirror image. What does that mean? The Equuschick really has no idea sometimes.


She does know that every time mankind comes up with a cunningly crafted logical theory like "mankind uses tools and animals don't" or "mankind has language and animals don't", the unborn and the elderly and people like The Cherub are left alone and helpless in a Nazi concentration camp while so-called Christians look away.

If you're ok with that, you are riding on a different train and nothing The Equuschick can say here will change your mind.

If you are not ok with that, it is time to choose a train.

Without the great I Am the questions like "what is life and who is human what does it mean to take it away" are meaningless. With Him, these questions are first bathed in coherency and then answered coherently.

Logic is a tool that is God-given and a tool that if used wisely can do much good. But Logic is not the I Am.

The Equuschick believes in the Great I Am. That He Is, and she believes that we are made in that image and that therefore the life of every human is sacred. She believes in fact that the unborn are human and therefore sacred.

But she believes more than that. She believes that creation itself has declared the Creator's existence and that every human on the face of the planet knows (or at least used to know) of His existence.

The Equuschick believes that we all affirm the sanctity of Life at least in theory and she also believes we are cowards who will not affirm it in Fact, and would rather hide the blood on our hands than cleanse them in the fountain of the Lamb.



When a newborn babe is thrown in a dump, there is outrage. What is the difference between the newborn child and the unborn? Months at the most. Minutes at the least. And yet our debates go on and on and on. Because we're fools. All answering each-other according to our collective human guilt and folly.

When we have to fight the powers that be to have it written in the laws of the land that life begins at conception, the writing is already on the wall. Does that mean we should not fight? No. As long as there are still babies dying, it is never too late to try to save even one life. But we may be too late to save our country and The Equuschick weeps in shame. Yes, shame.

She is proud of what our country used to stand for and she is proud of men like her husband and father who stood for those symbols.

But they are symbols only now and what we are in fact is a white-washed tomb stuffed clear to the roof with the mangled bodies of innocent infants. And when a pagan author is willing to look inside the tomb and call it what it is while the so-called God-fearing folk bury themselves in the latest Christian romance or the latest edition of the prosperity gospel books, that forebodes only ill for the coming generations.


Yes, The Equuschick believes there is strong evidence for what she believes. But not enough for her to prove conclusively that her train is the right train. We have all to choose our trains. And choosing not to choose is not an option. Choose one or get run over.

Burdens Still To Bear

One of the things Jen Hatmaker wrote in the 'After the Airport' post about adoption was not specifically about adoption, and for some reason, it really resonated with me:

the big moment - be it a blessed high or a devastating low - is never the completion. The grief and struggle, the work and effort, the healing and restoring comes later.

It's kind of like the after Christmas letdown around here, only there's more than that.
We are thrilled that Striderling is home, that his new diagnosis is so much, much, much more hopeful than the death sentence we lived with for the last year.  Truly, we never do lose sight of that, even when still a little punchy from the experience of a blood draw turning into a ten day hospital stay, and surgery to come.

His parents are also looking at increased appointments (twice weekly, at a minimum) in addition to their already full and exhausting weeks of therapy rounds with three different therapists and therapy exercises on their own without the therapists, a barrage of appointments with additional specialists, and trying to squeeze in major surgery for their one year old with the upcoming birth of their second child (the doctor initially told them surgery in 3-4 weeks, and the HG looked at them and said, "You mean around my due date?"  Oops, they agreed that would not work).  So they hit the ground running this morning with a therapy appointment by 9 a.m.

The thing is that even before, during and after those airport moment, life has this annoying habit of going on.  Just when you'd like to clear the decks and focus only on this one blissful, joyful result (The Striderling's future prognosis does not include statistics like '80 % do not survive their 2nd birthday, those who do survive have organ failures in their teens, and we haven't seen enough adult survivors to get a good feel for what they can expect....)- but the decks are not cleared, there is time to rejoice, but not to focus, and the world keeps on spinning with all the drama and  heart-ache of a fallen world.

On the home front,my dad is now permanently in the altzheimer's wing of a local nursing home, however, they have to keep increasing his medications for aggression, and he's to have a psychological evaluation over it.

I completely spazzed and missed my sleep study appointment scheduled for last night- for completely understandable reasons to us,but I am not sure the hospital is going to be so sympathetic.  I'm kicking myself because I had the chance to go in early last week when somebody else canceled their appointment, but I didn't take it.  I stop breathing, according to my previous sleep study, 35 times an hour, so it's no wonder I'm so exhausted all the time.

I missed the appointment not just because I was distracted by the Children's Hospital stuff and Striderling getting released, but because the Swain was behaving in distinctly unSwainlike fashion and we are pretty sure that relationship is not going to continue much longer, that, in fact, it's essentially over.  It was upsetting and frustrating, disappointing and seemed kind of unexpected, but as always, in retrospect, there were 'signs.' It was also more than a little inconvenient, which is silly in the vast perspective of things, but that is one of the trivialities that grabbed my mind ('really?  This needed to happen NOW?  Really?)  And, apologies, but that's really all I want to say about that.

More upsetting, particularly to the HG, is that before she left the hospital she got word that the little son of a friend of hers in another state, a mommy of two sweet little ones, was being rushed to the hospital, where he was promptly rushed to a bigger hospital- a viral infection in his bones, which also led to the discovery of leukemia.  I think from her perspective, it's a little like being a battleworn POW who has just escaped from the prison camp getting word that a good friend and comrade in arms has taken your place in the camp.  Please pray for that family.  It's a form with a high success rate (high being 80%)- but I think we all know how we'd feel if somebody offered our kids a bowl of candy and said, "Only 20% of the candy in this bowl will kill you."


I just finished reading Descent into Hell*, by Inkling Charles Williams.It's a strange tale reminiscent of the atmosphere in George MacDonald's Lilith or Phantastes
. It's about selfishness, love, the reality of the eternal and the spiritual, and, of course, about the ways we descend to hell.

  In the story, Pauline Anstruther has been terrified by poetry- upon reading the following lines by Shelley:

Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,

the Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image

Walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

...she has been haunted by a fear of meeting herself.  She confides this fear to the poet Stanhope, who offers to take the burden of her fear for her:

She said, still perplexed at a strange language : 'But how can I cease to be troubled ? will it leave
off coming because I pretend it wants you ? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street ?'

'It is not,' he said, 'and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet--never
mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you
heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens ?'

'But that means---' she began, and stopped.

'I know,' Stanhope said. 'It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being
anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when
Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he
meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is
precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however
sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there's no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It's a fact
of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking you to
do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn't sound very difficult.'

But it is, oh, it is.  I wish I knew how to bear others' burdens some way, to lighten their oh, so heavy loads.

--------------------------

*You can download it as a free ebook here.
You can get all 50 of George MacDonald's classics for around 2.00 for the Kindle here: The Complete Works of George MacDonald

It actually was warmer in England in Roman times

Eco-Who, an eco friendly site on sustainable living, run by people who:

are interested in fact led research and development that leads to a better future for all; ClimateGate is very indicative that at the very core of climate research the high standards that we all expected for such core research are not being upheld.

They are hosting a searchable database of all the Climate Gate emails.  Searching for things like Goldman-Sachs, Exxon, etc. is very amusing.

Here's what these 'experts' think of the rest of us- especially you who trust them to tell you the truth: not much.

Geoff Jenkins, manager of Climate Change Scenarios at the Hadley Centre, the Met Office, wrote to Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution of the Met Office/Hadley Centre, asking him what the Party Line or True Dogma is on the Medieval Warming Period:

What is the line to take, please, on "It was warmer in England in Roman times - grapes etc - so the Karoly & Stott attribution of recent CET warming to man is rubbish".

Peter Stott basically tells him to read RealClimate, the blog that the 'Team' admits they put together specifically for propaganda purposes (okay, I fudged- for 'PR').

Dr. Jenkins replies- admirably noting that he's not that impressed with the way Real Climate is too prone to defending Gore, and also saying:

Thanks. I think I will say: "Anecdotal evidence, for example the growingof grapes in the medieval period, has been used to imply that currentwarm temperatures in England have not been influenced by humanactivities. However, the popularity of grape growing is related to manyother factors apart from temperature, and the longest temperature recordin existence (that for the Low Countries (van Engelen, refernce??))indicates a medieval warm period that was cooler than currenttemperatures". OK?
I am not very convinced by it myself, but it's the best I can think of.Realclimate points out that "attribution doesn't depend on previousclimates changes", which I have used myself, but doesnt seem to applyhere, does it, because you use the lack of any natural warming fromobs/model as the way to rule out natural causes for the last 50 years.van Engelen (Fig 6 in UKCIP02) seems to show sustained warmings as bigas 1970-2000 in the 1300s.

So he's not very convinced by it, but apparently it was good enough for the hoi polloi.

Don't you wonder why they need to come up something they don't find convincing, but we might?  The truth doesn't support their narrative, the 'cause,' a phrase which, btw, you might also have fun searching for.

Home

Home, home, home, home, home. home, home, home.

Home.

Plus, the Striderling's begun crawling, just a few moves forward, maybe four or five, but left, right, left, right, arms and knees together,amazingly supporting himself on hands and knees instead of collapsing onto his belly and belly crawling in the most approved inchworm fashion.

And he's cute.

Home. Home, home.

World Bank, Goldman-Sachs, And How Dubious Rubbish Becomes Well Calibrated

Joe Smith, the co-organiser of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme at the BBC and a Climate Scientist exchange emails discussing funding and "getting global environmental change and sustainability issues into mainstream stories 'by stealth'"
The BBC's Alex Kirby chuckles about the BBC's impartiality, ho, ho, ho.

Not from the Climate Gate emails, but here's Alex Kirby explaining how he brought Climate Change reporting from the back page to the front- it's neither ethical nor neutral (emphasis added).

Often the BBC would refuse to run his exclusives because it had not heard them reported anywhere else. So he would persuade a friend to file the story with a domestic news agency first and then the BBC would then ask him to write something on the topic.Getting the environment into the news has been “a long battle, but the battle has paid off,” he said.
“Now there are heaps of environmental journalists.”

This is neither science nor news. It's  propaganda.
And speaking of propaganda, what does the World Bank have to do with the IPCC reports?  Read the comments here as well as the main post.

Goldman-Sachs?  Heh.

How peer reviewed papers have been kept out of the IPCC for purely political reasons.

Privately, several scientists argued that a particular temperature proxy series has a “dubious relationship to temperature” and they objected to it being included in scientific papers with their names attached- it perpetuated 'rubbish.'  However, publicly they insisted the same series is “well calibrated.”




That's because they don't have any respect for the rest of us at all, and they think we're dumber than a box of tree trunk samples.

just talked to the docs, and they are ordering discharge papers!!!

Cyber Monday Deals

(this post brought to you so early courtesy of the children's hospital Striderling is in. We had a 5 am blood draw, and now I'm waiting for some milk to thaw and warm so I can feed him before going back to sleep for an hour or so)

Some of the best looking Cyber Monday sales that came through my inbox this morning...

* Kohls is running 20% off of everything (use code cyber20) and offering completely free shipping with no minimum purchase required. Use your eBates account to get 6% cash back and the deal is made even sweeter (if there were things you actually were planning on getting at Kohls :).

* LivingSocial is offering $30 worth of Threadless Tees for $15. Not familiar with Threadless? Their stuff is fun... but also a total splurge. One of my favorites of their products is the Loch Ness Impostor t-shirt. Yeah, you didn't know I could be that weird, did you?

* A bit more practically, LivingSocial is also offering $20 worth of Office Max products for $10. This would be a good way to stock up on ink or paper at a decent rate.

* Groupon is offering $15 for $30 worth of organic skincare items from Nature Certified. Their products look excellent and typically priced for organic skincare (ie, somewhat expensive). Because of the Striderling's eczema, by the way, we only use extremely gentle naturally made soap for him. We found a local soap maker at our farmer's market this summer and have been using only her soap ever since. The Groupon deal is a nice one if you can't find a local supply and need or strongly prefer more natural options. Do run a search, though, for homemade soaps or natural soaps and your town. You might find a fabulous small, local business to support that way.

* Amazon is, of course, doing their Cyber Monday Week... I will confess to always being a bit overwhelmed by it, though.

okay... feed the baby, get sleep, hopefully awaken to fabulous blood lab results and doctors who are finally ready to sign release paperwork.

Maybe?

Benedict's Rule of Order for Housewives, chapter 10

From this website:

From Easter until the Calends of November let the same number of Psalms be kept as prescribed above; but no lessons are to be read from the book,on account of the shortness of the nights. Instead of those three lessons let one lesson from the Old Testament be said by heart and followed by a short responsory. But all the rest should be done as has been said; that is to say that never fewer than twelve Psalms should be said at the Night Office, not counting Psalm 3 and Psalm 94.

It's good to have a plan, to arrange in your mind (and in your home) you plan for regular prayers, meditations, and reading.  But if even Benedict, that confirmed bachelor and stickler for rules, suggests that adjustments to the lengths of the readings should be made for the monks 'on account of the shortness of the nights,' I think wives and mothers might also cut themselves some slack 'on account of the shortness of the nights.  This is particularly true when the nights are short because of sick, fractious, or merely wide awake children.

Striderling Saturday Morning

... his calcium levels were good enough to try taking him *completely* off the IV. They'll do another blood draw tonight and one tomorrow morning. IF his numbers are stable, we'll be able to go home.

What Does Inflation Look Like?

I think it looks something like the cost of your Thanksgiving Dinner going up 13%, while your wages stagnate.

Looking worse in Europe.

Wish I could make politicians read and grasp Basic Economics

Black Friday Shopping & An Old Navy Deal

Strider and I had a few specific household goods we'd been waiting to purchase until Black Friday... and then Striderling ended up in the hospital and traditional Black Friday shopping went out the window (again). Discovered last night, though, that Kohls was letting people buy their Black Friday doorbuster deals online. Sweeeeet! Strider entertained the baby whilst I made our purchases.

Today I am excited because Groupon has one of their popular deals running for $20 worth of Old Navy merchandise for $10. I like quite a few of Old Navy's products (their maternity shirts have been some of my favorites), but usually choke at their prices and skip out on buying anything new of theirs. With this deal, I think I'll be able to justify getting something from there. ;)

(and, yes, we're still in the hospital. I am reading all of your comments and they mean Oh So Much).

For the Common Place Book

Hidden Art of Homemaking

I would define 'Hidden Art' as the art which is found in the 'minor' areas of life.
But 'minor' I mean what is involved in the everyday of anyone's life, rather than his career or profession.... But - and this needs emphasis -
a Christian, above all people, should live artistically, aesthetically, and creatively...
If we have been created in the image of an Artist,
then we should look for expressions of artistry...
Does this mean that we should all drop everything to concentrate on trying to develop into great artists? No, of course not. But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty...
The fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than a gradual drying up of creativity, and a blindness to ugliness...
People so often look into a daydream future with longing, while ignoring the importance of the present. We are all in danger of thinking, "Some day I shall be fulfilled. Someday I shall have the courage to start another life which will develop my talent", without ever considering the very practical use of that talent today in a way which will enrich other people's lives, develop the talent...

and express the fact of being a creative creature..."

Sweetness

 Quit trying to make me smile, people. This is no way to spend my first birthday.

Do you see what they DID to me?  They jabbed a hole in my foot, right here.

Besides, I'm exhausted.  I had a lot of tests today.

Okay, fine.  I'll smile.

What a difference a day makes.

Yes, one, I am one year old.

Ereaders and More

My Frugal Hacks post is here- I want your advice on e-readers this week.

Also, this is a really good day to join ebates- a few hundred stores are offering double cash back, and you get a lot of shopping done at home- very nice.

Updated to add:

Walmart is offering 2% cashback, usually it's only 1. You can get free shipping to your house for a lot of things, and free shipping to your local store on just about everything.
You know those coupon books for local entertainment discounts? They are 35% off this weekend and you get 40% cash back. This might be a sweet present for a newlywed or for a housewarming gift- or a nice treat to your own very busy self.

Barnes and Noble, Kohl's, Sephora- 10% back on your online purchases, today only. Get your Christmas shopping done in your p.j.s while sipping a cup of hot tea curled up on your couch.

Home Depot and Lowe's are 6 % cash back today only.

Old Navy is offering 7% back, today only.

Snapfish is offering 20% cash back, today only.


ebates is a really great tool in your frugalista tool chest, as long as it's a tool you pull out when looking for something you were going to buy somewhere anyway.

If asked for an email for the person who referred you: heartkeepercommonroom, gmail. You know.

Four Moms Wishing You A Happy Thanksgiving!

Be sure to check out what the other moms have to say:
Smockity Frocks, who made our lovely Thanksgiving label here to the left.
Raising Olives,
Life in a Shoe,

and then there's ME, here at the Common Room.

Here at the Common Room, we have a relatively recent tradition of getting together with Granny Tea for a Thanksgiving Dinner Planning Tea.  Pip spearheaded it this year and did almost all the planning and setting up with some help from siblings.

We sat at the table with elegant snacks of crackers and a cheese ball, sliced salami and pepperoni and cheese and crackers, cookies, our best teapots and china cups, an assortment of teas, and some home-made vanilla sugar we completely forgot we had made some time ago, so it was very vanilla (and yummy).

We planned our menu together, cell phones in hand, texting other guests to see if they minded bringing this, that, or the other thing.  We did this in between texting messages back and forth from the Children's Hospital, me doing some last minute grocery shopping and taking the Swain and the FYB to the store where we were getting all this free furniture

The FYB has been over to Granny Tea's twice now to help her set up for all of us.
Wednesday afternoon I left the Progeny in charge of our part of the Thanksgiving Dinner and came with my husband an hour and a half away to Children's hospital to visit the STriderling.  I'm typing this in his hospital room because I forgot to bring my own laptop.A young friend of ours recently bought a house just fifteen minutes from the hospital.  He has a twin mattress and several air mattresses on the floor, a couch, a television and a card table and chairs.  He's letting us stay in his house overnight while he goes back to his Mom's.

Thursday morning, we will will come back to see Striderling again, and then we head home to help out with any last minute touches with Thanksgiving and share in the dinner with everybody else.

What we are thankful for: (there are actually too many to mention)
A year of Striderling's smiles, hugs, and kisses.
Light at the end of the tunnel as doctors figure out his diagnosis and seem to be getting closer.
Wonderful Progeny
Adorable grandbabies
Sons in law who love their families
Granny Tea
each other
a home
freezers full of venison and ground beef
A wonderful church family, both local and world wide
A wonderful Savior

Thursday morning:
The internet (This is now being typed in the family lounge at the hospital while Striderling gets changed and rested after a difficult night)
Strawberry begonias, still blooming in the hospital flower beds
Hospital technicians so compassionate they tear up when they have to draw blood from the Striderling, even though they are also so capable they are done in 3 minutes.
crackers and cheese
electricity
hot running water
trees
the color green
all the colors
toothbrushes
The technology that allows the hospital to discover that Striderling's Calcium levels are still not where they should be, that allows them to look at his kidneys and skeleton without opening him up
The Dread Pirate Grasshopper's lively, enchanting spirit and joi de vivre
The Ladybug's gentle smile and easy going nature
rain



You?

Climate Gate 2

There's been another release of Climate-Gate related emails.

Via Watts:

We’ve known for some time that Al Gore made up a bunch of claims in his AIT movie that simply weren’t true. Now this revelation in the new email batch shows that in the case of Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snows, even Phil Jones and Dr. Lonnie Thompson don’t believe global warming is the cause, even though Thompson put out a press release nearly a year ago saying just that. Told ya so. Pants on fire and all that. Anything for “the cause” right?

Phil Jones is caught trying to deleted emails to avoid a FOI request again:

Dave,
Do I understand it correctly – if he doesn’t pay the £10 we don’t have to respond?

With the earlier FOI requests re David Holland, I wasted a part of a day deleting
numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have
virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.
There might be some bits of pieces of paper, but I’m not wasting my time
going through these.

Cheers
Phil

He wasn't very clever about breaking the law, and his colleagues attempted to help him avoid getting caught:

date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 19:49:18 -0000 (GMT)from: “Tim Osborn”subject: RE: FW: FOI_08-50 ; EIR_08-01to: “Jones Philip Prof”Hi Phil!re. your email to Dave Palmer [which he copied in his response to you andcc'd to me, Keith & Michael McGarvie, and which has hence already beenmultiply copied within the UEA system, and therefore will probably existfor a number of months and possibly years, and could be released under FOIif a request is made for it during that time!]… I assume that you didn’tdelete any emails that David Holland has requested (because that would beillegal) but that instead his request merely prompted you to do a springclean of various other emails that hadn’t been requested, as part of yourregular routine of deleting old emails. If that is what you meant, thenit might be a good idea to clarify your previous email to Dave Palmer, toavoid it being misunderstood. The way things seem to be going, I think it best if we discuss all FOI,EIR, Data Protection requests in person wherever possible, rather than viaemail. It’s such a shame that the skeptics’ vexatious use of thislegislation may prevent us from using such an efficient modern technologyas email, but it seems that if we want to have confidential discussionsthen we may need to avoid it.I shall delete this email and those related to it as part of my regularroutine of deleting old emails!CheersTim

Just a reminder from the last batch of Climate Gate emails- although claiming they've just been swamped by FOI requests has been part of their coordinated response to criticism from people with enough respect for science to be skeptical, in truth, they were deleting emails as a preemptive effort to avoid FOIA requests before they'd ever gotten one!  
Willis Eschenback filed a FOIA request that Phil Jones denies for spurious reasons in these emails, and the FOIA officer, David Palmer, reveals what certainly looks like complicity. Eschenbach fills us in.
Also, privately, David Palmer admits that they don't really have the data, because their book-keeping was so sloppy they don't know which data goes to which station!

More here- several of them admit privately what they refuse to admit publicly- that Michael Mann's hockey stick is indefensible, deeply flawed, that trees make poor thermometers.

And more here:

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

Thorne keeps trying to tell them:

Thorne:I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on itwhich for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run. 

And John Daly's letter to the global warming 'team' on all the incredible flaws in using tree rings, as they did, to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period (and more) is an absolute MUST read. 
Michael Mann admits that he and Gavin Schnidt simply delete any problematic posts bringing attention to the tree ring problem at their climate blog.

Even Warmist David Appell thinks this release is devastating, and he hilights several emails he thinks are particularly troubling.


Evidence that Jones and Trenberth had a peer reviewed paper excluded from the IPCC report for political reasons.

The emails are rife with evidence that the warmist climate scientists who sent them are politically motivated activists more than neutral, objective scientists.

In Which The Hospital Provides Some Comic Relief

(warning, this post contains discussions of some bodily fluids the Victorian Minded HG tries not to mention most of the time, but hey... we're in a hospital, trying to get information about our son's condition, and some boundary lines are gone these days)

Because the Striderling's condition could be genetic, the specialists requested samples from his father and me. They wanted blood tests and samples of A Different Bodily Fluid... you know, the one where they hand you a cup and send you off to the Gents' or Ladies' Room. So Not Fun. Strider doesn't mind them as much as I do (for fairly good reasons).

Monday we dutifully went downstairs and contributed our blood and our body's byproducts to the hospital labs and the world of science. Tuesday the doctors came in and said our blood looked normal and the Strider's Other Stuff looked normal, but the lab had lost my O.S. and could I please go do it again? Yay.

I guzzled some water and then we decided that since I had to go downstairs to the collection place anyway, we might as well make a family outing of it all. We got the Striderling ready, made sure his IV was ready to travel, and Strider did his usual routine of using the facilities before a long walk. I am 36 weeks pregnant. By the time we were ready to leave the room, I was nearing the waddling desperation familiar to any woman who has guzzled fluids. We got to the sampling center, I handed them my prescription, and they said, "Nooo... the lab misplaced your husband's sample. We don't need yours, we need his." I said, "Are you sure?" He checked with his other staff member, said yes, it was his that we needed.

I made a beeline for the bathroom.

Then I came back and told Strider what was up. Considering the fact he had taken care of business before leaving our room, he headed off to give himself some fluids. And while he was gone, a somewhat sheepish employee came out of the office and said, "Actually, we DO need yours and not your husband's."

Oh.

Thankfully they were willing to just give us the collection supplies and let us take them all back to the room so we could let nature take its course. And today we got the results back (normal), so things weren't misplaced this time around (I must admit to being slightly grossed out at the thought of a lab losing THAT).

Striderling Update

Most recent updates are on top:

11/26 a.m.
We'll pass over all the miserable reasons why the 6 am draw wasn't actually a 6 am draw and we didn't get a blood test and results 'til 9:30 am, with an exhausted, stressed, and hurt baby, four stressed nurses, and two stressed parents. BUT. At 9:30 his calcium levels had gone down again... below even the level they were at last time they had gone down. MAJOR THANKSGIVING! Their next step is to cut the IV fluids and check his levels between now and tomorrow. They actually said the words "if his numbers are good, we'd like to release you tomorrow." Praying, praying, praying that the numbers continue to be stable.
We are still experiencing feeding issues. Please pray that those resolve themselves soon too.
And thank you so much, everyone. ♥
---------------------------------


11/25 pm: ‎6 pm blood draw: his levels had increased, although they were still in the range of normal. They're keeping him on IV fluids overnight, but still at half the level they were this morning. So now we wait for 6 am.
----------------------------------------

11/25 Friday morning update: the six am levels had decreased again. Yay! They are reducing IV fluids in a little bit, and then we'll measure at six pm. If they're good at six pm, they'll go off. Please pray they continue to go down! We've also only been giving him half feedings while he's on the IV because anything higher than that tends to make him sick. As we go down with the IV we'll work at building up feedings. Prayers that the feeding increases go well are also appreciated!

--------------------------------------

late Thursday night... his evening calcium levels came back in the range of normal again, which is very nice. The doctors decided to keep him on full IV fluids longer this time, instead of immediately reducing them like they've been doing. That's tended to cause a yo-yo effect. I think they're hoping (and I am too!) that this will give his levels time to work downward some more and that weaning him off of IV fluids might go better tomorrow. I think the plan is to check levels again in the morning and then, if they're still good, begin (again) trying to wean him off. So we continue the waiting and watching game.
-------------------------------------------------
Thursday a.m.: calcium levels back up to 12.=(
================
Wednesday night update- from Strider:
1.) X-rays -- we did get them taken today, Striderling was getting tired of everything by that point, but otherwise did incredibly well.

2.) Calcium levels -- where do I start, hmm;
--- first off, the levels were up again when they checked his blood in the evening
... --- also, due to some miscommunication he had to effectively get double stuck for that reading.
--- They have upped the fluids again to help flush his system and, if I understood correctly, they will probably want to re-administer the medication to help control the calcium levels - this can take up to 48hrs to kick in, so should they decide to administrate it, we'll possibly be here longer, but hopefully not

3.) no more information at this time about how to get a better look at the parathyroid

4.) we are beginning/continuing to be concerned about Striderling's physical therapy. He was beginning to pull himself into the crawl position before we had to come in, and has tried to a couple of times while we've been here, but due to his IV, his left hand and arm are practically unusable for any kind of therapy or exercises which could set him back further in his motor skills development. We also have to be much more careful about his feedings as well as his eating exercises as much more than half a standard feeding seems to give him cause to promptly lose whatever was in his stomach. So there are several side-effect setbacks that are throwing things a bit right now.

5.) I know many are already doing this, but I would like to make a special request that [my wife's] and my nerves be kept in your prayers as well - all of this, while not as stressful as the last time we were here, is still quite the mess to get our heads around and the stress levels are climbing right now, especially as the duration of our stay here seems to continually push itself longer and longer and the baby's due date keeps pushing in closer and closer.
-----------------------------------

2:40 update:

Updates... 1) His calcium levels this morning came back at 10.4, which is finally within the range of normal (they want it to be 10.5 or below) and probably lower than his body has ever known it. SO, SO, SO thankful! They are cutting his IV fluids in half and will draw blood again at 11 pm. If his levels are still doing well then, they'll turn the IV completely off and test levels again in the morning. So many prayers of thanks about the lower levels and continued prayers needed that his levels either stay stable off the IV or continue to decrease because of the medication.

2) His imaging exam was not that helpful. The doctor said he couldn't see any growths or enlargements on the parathyroids, which is what they are looking out for. Next step is exploratory surgery... having a surgeon go in (not sure how yet) and actually take a look for himself. If his levels continue to be stable with this medication, I think they want to give themselves plenty of time to plan this surgery.

They have been talking to a parathyroid/bone specialist at Harvard who wants another full set of skeletal x-rays done. The last ones were when he was three weeks old and they want to see how things look now... maybe things won't be so weird, maybe they can get more information, they want to see if there have been changes yet, etc. etc. They'd like to schedule these x-rays before our release, although the doctor said she would make sure they didn't hold back our release. As far as I can tell, release hinges greatly on how his calcium levels do off of the IV.

 From the DHM: as soon as my husband gets home from work we are heading to the Children's hospital (an hour and a half away in good traffic,w hich we do not expect) to visit them.  Within two minutes of putting out a request for a couch nearby, two Christian friends down there had offered us room- even on the eve of Thanksgiving.

We'll stay the night down south and go see them again in the morning before coming up north to have Thanksgiving Dinner with the rest of our children and grandchildren and my mom, plus assorted other friends and friends who might as well be family- at last count 26 in all.

---------------------

Noon update: He's out of the anesthesia and mostly cheerful, his mummy reports. Whew.  No word on results or blood tests yet.
---------------------


More specific (10:16 a.m.)

Wednesday Morning, two *very* specific prayer requests:
they're putting Striderling under anaesthesia shortly for a nuclear imaging test of his parathyroids. While he's under, they're also doing a blood draw to test his calcium and phos levels. MAJOR prayer requests here:

1) please pray that the imaging test gives us good information ~ clear answers and answers that help our endo team on to the next step of figuring out exact causes and long term solutions.

2) please pray that his calcium levels have gone DOWN dramatically and that his phos levels are UP. They started a new medication Monday night and immediately reduced his IV fluids at the same time. Yesterday's blood draw showed increased calcium levels, which wasn't what we wanted to hear. They suspect that they reduced fluids before the medication had time to kick in. By now the medicine should have started to have an effect ~ if it's going to work at this dosage ~ and we should be able to tell from his draw. Or at least begin to see a trend (they'll do another draw tonight).
IF his levels are good, they'll start working him off of IV fluids almost immediately and we will be OH SO MUCH closer to going HOME. If his levels don't seem to have been affected by the medication, they'll start a new dosage of the medication tomorrow and we'll play a two day waiting game all over again. Obviously do not want to do this. They also may consider surgery much sooner than they really want to, if his levels seem to be stubbornly holding at this level.

------------------

The Striderling is scheduled for a radioactive imaging test this morning. He will be under anesthesia for about 3 hours on this, his first birthday.  If they don't actually see anything suspicious, they next step is exploratory surgery at some other date in the near future.  We'd rather not have him endure exploratory surgery at all.

It's better than last year, but still hard.

Thanks for all the prayers and good wishes.  We all appreciate them so much.

Turkey Turnovers, or Everything's Better with Mayonnaise

Disclosure: This is a compensated post. The opinions are my own. I choose which compensated posts I apply for, and I do not apply for posts advertising products I don't or won't use.
As my regular readers know, I've been trying to eat low-carb for a few weeks now. Mayonnaise is an important condiment to us low-carbers, and it's a very nourishing food, not just for low-carbers.
And as most of my regular readers know, I prefer to make my own mayo. Sometimes I don't have all the ingredients I need, or I don't have the time, or I am using the mayonnaise in a recipe I can't keep chilled. For those times, I keep store-bought mayonnaise on hand.
I also cook a lot with mayonnaise, and I'm always looking for more ways to prepare leftovers, so I was excited when I was asked to make the following recipe and tell y'all about it, AND share an exciting giveaway opportunity with all of you!
BlogHer and Hellmann’s® are providing a $100 cooking.com gift card to one lucky reader (see rules below).
To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment on this post telling me how you plan on using your turkey leftovers this holiday season.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:
• Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post.
• Tweet about this promotion, adding @hellmanns to the end, and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post.
• Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post.
• For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.
Rules:
No duplicate comments.
This giveaway is open to U.S. residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.
The Official Rules are available here.
The recipe is even better, because everybody can be a winner with this recipe. It's for Turkey Turnovers. They are portable palate pleasers, and they don't take any time at all to prepare. Cook your turkey and measure out two cups of shredded, cooked turkey (chicken would be good, too).

We made a double batch, plus we were working on a comparison of bone-in vs. boneless turkey, but that's another post.
Add: 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (about 4 oz.)
1 cup chopped cooked broccoli. About that broccoli...we used frozen organic broccoli. Instead of cooking it, we put it in a colander and ran lukewarm water over it until it was no longer frosty:

Then we cut it up with a food chopper:

Stir this into the shredded turkey along with: 1/2 cup Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper

Mix well:

Our cheddar cheese is raw and undyed, so you can't see it in the picture, but it's there. And you know what? That's just as delicious as it looks, only more so. I had to keep batting at fingers as my teens and even the young twenties were reaching for tastes, and then reaching again for second and third tastes. Um, full disclosure, because the Progeny will read this: I had to bat away their busy, thieving hands so I could snatch up a pinch for myself. =)
Next, take 2 packages (8 oz. ea.) refrigerated crescent rolls.
Separate each package crescent rolls into 4 squares; press diagonal perforations to seal.
Spoon turkey filling onto center of each square.

Next, you should fold dough diagonally over filling to form triangles; pressing edges firmly to seal. However, we're homeschoolers and don't follow directions well, so we made rectangles:

Arrange turnovers on baking sheet and brush tops lightly with additional Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise. This step, IMHO, is optional. However, it's a great idea for low-carbers. Bake 12 minutes or until golden.

Serve warm.
Because we doubled the recipe, and one of us can't eat them due to allergies, and one of us shouldn't eat the crescent roll crust, we had some leftover. We ate them cold the next day and they were still good. Hot was best. but cold was really still quite tasty and definitely better than a cold lunch meat sandwich.
It was a hit with every member of the family. Jenny says it's a keeper for sure. The HG tasted one of the cold ones when we went to visit her, and she asked me for the recipe and made her own batch using biscuits for the outer wrapper the very next day.
It reminded me a little of my empanada recipe, except the filling with the Hellmann's® Mayonnaise is definitely better. Next time I make empanadas, I will be adding mayonaisse to the filling. I believe it will be much moister that way.
We also froze an experimental batch, and I'll be reporting back in a week or two how those turn out.
Here's the recipe again, all in one place:
Turkey Turnovers
2 cups shredded cooked turkey
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (about 4 oz.)
1 cup chopped cooked broccoli
1/2 cup Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
2 packages (8 oz. ea.) refrigerated crescent rolls
Preheat oven to 375°.
Combine all ingredients except crescent rolls in large bowl.
Separate each package crescent rolls into 4 squares; press diagonal perforations to seal.
Spoon turkey filling onto center of each square.
Fold dough diagonally over filling to form triangles; press edges firmly to seal.
Arrange turnovers on baking sheet and brush tops lightly with additional Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise.
Bake 12 minutes or until golden.
Serve warm.
If you liked this, pass it on!
As if that wasn't enough, you have another chance to win! Here's another giveaway:

• Hellmann’s® is on a mission to help moms re-think main dish meals and leftovers by offering easy, delicious recipes that are great for the busy holiday season, such as Turkey Casserole and Bobby Flay’s “Stuffing” Crusted Turkey Cutlets.
• Take a break from the holiday hustle and bustle to join in the contest each week at Hellmanns.com as Turkey Casserole goes head-to-head with other tasty, juicy turkey recipes.
• Cast your vote for your favorite and enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win one of four $250 grocery gift cards each week.** If there are more than 10,000 entries, the prize value doubles to a $500 grocery gift card! **
• **No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. The Hellmann's Turkey Challenge is sponsored by Conopco, Inc., d/b/a Unilever. Open to legal residents of the 50 U.S. & D.C., 18 & older. Begins 12:00 a.m. ET on 9/12/11 & ends 11:59 p.m. ET on 12/5/11. For official rules, visit Hellmanns.com.
• For more opportunities to win, visit the Hellmann's Round-up page on BlogHer.com to read other bloggers’ reviews!

How cool is that? Who couldn't use extra grocery money?
For more information on the contest or Hellmann’s^® products and recipes, visit Hellmanns.com

Linked up at:

At Home With Hailey
Dining With Debbie
What's Cooking Thursday
My Girlish Whims

Thanks, Duckies!!!

We won Best Variety.=)

  See the results for all 20 categories here.

After the Airport...

If you've ever thought of adoption, even a little bit, you should read this. If you know anybody at all who has adopted or is thinking about adoption, you should read this and consider passing it on.

But Brandon and I decided some time ago to go at this honestly, with truthful words and actual experiences that might encourage the weary heart or battle some of the fluffy, damaging semi-truths about adopting. Because let me tell you something: If you are intrigued by the idea of adoption, with the crescendoing storyine and happy airport pictures and the sigh-inducing family portrait with the different skin colors and the feely-feel good parts of the narrative, please find another way to see God's kingdom come.


You cannot just be into adoption to adopt; you have to be into parenting.


And it is hard, hard, intentional, laborious work. Children who have been abused, abandoned, neglected, given away, given up, and left alone are shaken so deeply, so intrinsically, they absolutely require parents who are willing to wholly invest in their healing; through the screaming, the fits, the anger, the shame, the entitlement, the bed-wetting, the spitting, the rejection, the bone-chilling fear. Parents who are willing to become the safe place, the Forever these children hope for but are too terrified to believe in just yet.

Click through and read it all.
Then pray for those people you know who are adopting, who have adopted, who are thinking about adopting, for the children who are adopted, for the orphans who need.... something.


I feel guilty sometimes, I do, because ours is essentially a happily ever after story. It was hard at first, and there did come a time when I looked into a long, sad future where one of my children would never, ever love me, or even be able to feel anything less than anger and resentment for me.

I had a time where I thought we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. And then there came that day where I sat and faced that dark future, and told myself, "So she will never love you. She didn't ask for this, you did. She didn't choose you, you chose her. So tough. You chose to be a parent, you will love her anyway no matter what and won't be loved back and that's just the way it is get over it."

And the thing is, it was within the next year when things started to get better, and now it's as though that dark,stark reality was a bad dream. And the other thing is, I never said a word about any of this at all in the midst of it, because nobody wanted to know. All my friends only wanted to hear the happy-ever-after story, so that is what I let them think.

Oh, I tried. I hinted. I tentatively said little, careful, trial ballon sorts of things, and every single one of them my cheerful, happy, friends quickly and promptly pricked with their pins of happiness and dismissal ("Oh, no, I'm sure she loves you, she's just confused." "Oh, no, I'm sure she didn't mean to push you away and tell you she hates you." "Oh, you're just having a bad day, have some chocolate." No, actually, I was having a bad life, not a bad day, but never mind.)

And so not only did I have to sit down and shake myself hard and face the grim future of a child who owned my heart but wanted nothing to do with it, I also had to face the lonely realization that nobody wanted to hear me. Nobody wanted to know, and they had all made that perfectly clear. So I settled that as well on the day that looking back feels as though it was actually the beginning of the end of the hatred my child felt toward me, the woman who, from her perspective, had taken her from all she knew and loved.

She got over it, and it really is good now. Naturally, being a firstborn and now a survivor of sorts, I feel guilty, because for some people it never does get better. The nightmare is only and always ever a nightmare. And as hard as it was in the worst of our dark period, we were safe enough. I had to guard against some serious shortcomings in the impulse control department which had resulted in a couple of dangerous accidents to other people, but there was never hostile intent to cause physical harm. Some people have to lock their doors or put alarms up, and hide the knives and matches.

Adoption isn't always a fairy tale. And you aren't helping if your reply is to say, "Well, neither is life, neither is having biological children," because while that's kind of true, it's also kind of not at all the same thing. While we may never know exactly what to expect, and tragedies enter into the lives of biological families, too, it's really far, far less likely that a strictly biological family will ever, as one family I know of did, have to institutionalize one child to prevent him from raping or maiming his siblings. The parents were crushed, and they visit the institutionalized child regularly, but he is dangerously violent and can probably never be safely released. It's unlikely that your biological children will wonder if and when you are getting rid of them, and act out accordingly.

Does this mean nobody should ever adopt? Of course not. As Jen says, adoption isn't always the answer, but it definitely is an answer and the right answer in some circumstances. But do you know what I suspect is worse than never being adopted? Being adopted, and then being given back because your new parents were all about the adoption, or saving the Black Children, or Rescuing the Orphan and not really so much about dealing with the reality of an abandoned, hurting, wounded child who might not actually be grateful, who might even be resentful.

Jen is writing about more than adoption, and I hope you read it all. There may be many times in your life where what she has to say will resonate with you.

A Civilized Luncheon

Scandalous as it may sound, between Shasta's work and school schedule very rarely do they have a sit-down meal with the Dread Pirate Grasshopper. (And the Ladybug's meals are well, at least The Equuschick gets to set down.)

Occasionally however an opportunity presents itself and then they like to pretend that they are a civilized household instead of a den of savages and reprobates.

Tablecloth and cloth napkins. Classical music. Candles lit. Prayers first. And etc.

And then The Grasshopper climbs down from his chair. And The Equuschick says "Get back in your chair please." And he announces with a sense of great self-importance, "I'm burping." (Burping for the Dread Pirate Grasshopper is code for other things of a more posterior nature.)

"Oh," says The Equuschick with her eyebrows slightly raised. "Do you need someone to take you to the bathroom?" He is not in fact even remotely potty-trained yet, but this seems a good time to initiate a dialogue.

"Ok, big boy potty?" says the Dread Pirate. And Shasta and the Dread Pirate head to The Facilities.

Where nothing happens, but Shasta does remove a wet diaper and clothes from the Dread Pirate Grasshopper who cheerfully returns to his seat and makes a dive for the bread. He is told he must his meatballs before his french bread.

(Before you get carried away by The Equuschick's nutritional standards, please understand that she was essentially saying in the context of this particular meal- "Please eat your nitrate-laden protein source before you eat your diabetes-inducing white bread.")

He does. Then he eats his bread. Then, like a famous Emperor before him, he seems to notice something is missing.

"Hey, where clothes?1"