Jessie and experiencing life

Jessie got her turn on the cute-o-meter.

For whatever reason, she wouldn’t go to sleep last night. The medicine must have been working, because she was up, happy, and ready to roll at 11. And at 12. And at 1….

Sometime in that area, when I was with her in her room attempting to wind her down, she did the strangest (and cutest thing). She spun around clockwise three times, stopped, looked around a bit, said “Boo”, then spun around counterclockwise three times.

I guess she had to reset the Boo clock or something.

A few things Jacob’s said…

Today, they started putting the concrete walls up at Springcreek (our church). Jacob was asked how long he thought it would take.

“A rainy day. And a non-rainy day. That’s as long as my life.”

We have a Zen master in training…

Potty training is also going on, and today, Jacob reported that he pee-peed in the aerial at church, just like papa did at the airport…This is in addition to attempting to stick his you-can-guess-what through the convenience flaps of his underwear…

I know, I haven’t worked with him enough on “Sink The Cheerio”. I’m getting there.

Jessie’s starting to say words. “Poo-poo” was a big one today.

Another day…

Another headache.

What’s happening around these parts: new year, new commitment to Mary Kay for Laureen. I’m happy that she’s getting her business moving, but it does mean more time for me to be the Parent In Charge. Of course, Laureen would argue that she’s the Parent In Charge all day while I’m at work… and on and on goes another round of “whose job is harder”.

Well, it’s my blog, so I get to write what I feel, right?

I’m tired right now. There’s so many areas in our lives that need changing and fixing, planning and analyzing, etc., that I just don’t know how to begin.

We need a different washer. The one we have isn’t suited for second floors, and we need to get one that is.

We need to get out of debt. This means planning and recording our budget — daily (or at least weekly) tasks.

I need to keep exercising. I can’t rest on that.

Of course, none of this addresses a key question: what do I want out of this year?

I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying hard not to fail at things. This is not the same as succeeding. I just try not to fail, and it usually winds up costing me in terms of enjoying life.

Now Who’s Pregnant Again? Not Us.

No it ain’t us. However, I wanted to repost this op-ed from USA Today that I found intriguing:

For Christian conservatives, the pregnancy, at 16, of Nickelodeon actress Jamie Lynn Spears – the wholesome star of Zoey 101 and younger sister of troubled singer Britney Spears – poses a good news-bad news dilemma.

Lopeynote: #1: Why is even bad news “good news”? Why can’t something just be WRONG, for crying out loud?

“We should commend girls like Jamie Lynn Spears for making a courageous decision to have the baby,” summed up Bill Maier, vice president of the conservative ministry Focus on the Family. “On the other hand, there’s nothing glamorous or fun about being an unwed teen mother.”

Lopeynote: Unless, of course, your last name is Spears, you have an acting career, and you can afford to make mistakes.

No one would argue with that sentiment. For teens of lesser means, pregnancy takes away much more than fun and glamour. It greatly reduces chances that the young mother will ever escape poverty.

For all the agreement about the problem, however, a failure to recognize facts appears to be interfering with finding solutions. The Bush administration is sticking adamantly to abstinence-only sex education, which was adopted at the urging of religious conservatives, even as evidence mounts that such programs are failing.

Lopeynote: Emphasis and bolding mine. This is nothing new. Do not let facts get in the way of your agenda.

The teen birth rate, which declined 34% from 1991 to 2005, increased 3% in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s too soon to say whether this is a blip or a trend, but at the grassroots level, states and school districts appear to be turning away from abstinence-only, presumably because of poor results. The Washington Post reported this month that 14 states had notified the federal government they would no longer be seeking money for abstinence-only programs.

Lopeynote: Admittedly, this is a poor presumption. It could be that such funding is tied to other stipulations having nothing to do with birth control. However, 14 states is almost 30%.

Plenty of studies show that the best approach is a combination of sex education and abstinence counseling. And this year, an eight-year, government-funded study by the non-partisan Mathematica Policy Research Inc. concluded that there was no evidence abstinence-only programs reduced teen sexual activity. Yet the administration is in denial.

Lopeynote: Telling someone no, especially teenagers for whom boundary stretching is already a de rigeur part of turning into adults, doesn’t work, especially since sex, unlike drugs and alcohol, requires nothing illegal (like a fake ID or buying illegal drugs).

Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General from 2002 to 2006, has revealed that he was pressured to emphasize abstinence and ignore facts about sex education. Congress’ non-partisan Government Accountability Office has found that most abstinence programs are not reviewed in a scientifically acceptable manner.

The price of such willful ignorance is high. Eleven percent of all births in the USA, about 750,000 a year, are to teens – higher than in any industrialized country, according to a 2006 report from the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates birth control. Eight in 10 of these pregnancies are unintended.

Lopeynote: The numbers astound me on several fronts. The fact that 2 of 10 teen pregnancies are intended is also somewhat disturbing, but the sheer volume of kids having kids means that we’re going to have Grandparents and even Great-Grandparents (who will probably be only 60 if the pattern holds) taking care of newborns.

With any luck, Spears’ Zoey 101 devotees won’t follow her example, nor will teens find less reason for caution in the current comedy Juno, in which a teenager has a baby with positive outcomes in the end.

Jamie Lynn says that her pregnancy surprised her and that, in retrospect, she and her boyfriend should have waited. Familiar words from pregnant teens. If more girls were taught all their options in Sex 101, those words might be heard less often.

Lopeynote: O RLY?

An update promising a better update

I’ve been on vacation and haven’t updated either this site or lopeyland.com lately. I’m working on it. A lot’s gone on and continues on, as usual. The salient highlights:

Not using the proper safety guard on a mandoline slicer — bad idea. Learning how to deal with fingertip bandages while bleeding profusely — useful skill. Learning how not to grimace at the sight of “AGH! BLOOD!” — good idea.

Jacob is “free and two-firds”. Jessie’s almost 19 months.

We’ll be sending Christmas cards out this year. Believe it or not.

On “The Golden Compass” and the hubris of reactionary behavior

By now, most of you may have seen the chain mail going around that begins:

Just wanted you all to be aware…

“There will be a new children’s movie out in December called “The
Golden Compass“. The movie has been described as “atheism for kids”
and is based on the first book of a trilogy entitled “His Dark
Materials” that was written by Phillip Pullman. Pullman is a militant
atheist and secular humanist who despises C. S. Lewis and the
“Chronicles of Narnia”. His motivation for writing this trilogy was
specifically to counteract Lewis’ symbolisms of Christ that are
portrayed in the Narnia series.

It goes on to call Pullman the scourge of humanity for writing evil books, asking for a boycott of the movie, etc.

I would like to go on record with the following statement:

I. Do. Not. Care.

Reasons forthwith:

  1. People who have sent these messages out or received them have probably not been too terribly concerned with what their kids have been reading up until now. A fantasy book about talking trains? Talking animals? People with fantastic powers?
    If you care so much about what your kids watch or read, read it with them. Be with them. Get involved in their habits and hobbies.
  2. Reading a book about killing God is as likely to turn a person to Atheism as reading Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind: the High-School Musical Edition will make people turn to Christianity. I’d be more worried about teenagers reading Ayn Rand’s books, but then again, Rand’s selfish philosophy tends to mirror that of teenagers pretty well.
  3. Christians have a hard time letting the world happen and dealing with it. Don’t like the music your kids listen to? Christian Radio! Don’t like what they read? Christian Books (featuring Bibleman)! Don’t like what’s on TV? Touched By An Angel! All of it deeply violates the principles that Jesus showed when he ate with sinners: we have to interact with this world on its level, not some lofty ideal of what this world should be.

I want my kids to make good choices. I want them to understand that there’s a God and that He has a place in their lives. But if that’s the only thing they see, it’s just as bad as the scales that covered Paul’s eyes before his Emmaus conversion. Know there’s evil out there, but also know how to handle it.

And let’s not burn books, OK? Totalitarian regimes do that.

When You Open Your Mouth

I was idly talking to myself this morning while waiting for the Circus Day parade to start at Jacob and Jessie’s preschool:

“…then I need to figure out the HTML…”

A woman hears this and speaks to me, “…HTML? Do you need help with something? I’m a web designer.”

“Yeah,” I respond, “I’m trying to figure out Ruby and Ruby on Rails in order to implement database transactions easily.”
“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah, Rails is nice because it builds you a scaffolding system that handles a lot of the database transaction dirty work for you without making you pull teeth to get the syntax right, especially in XML.”

“That sounds like something our sponsor needs,” she goes on. “We send them big sheets of XML and they have no idea what to do with it.”

“So what languages do you work in?” I ask.

“HTML.”

…

It is at this point that I must stop and make a digression. I’ve been idly doing web pages for about 12 years now. There is a large difference between simply creating a page, laying it out, and making it look good (which are difficult skills to do well–don’t let me deprecate that knowledge at all) and the “learn a new programming language, figure out how to connect to databases, figure out how to interact with databases, figure out how to do asynchronous Javascript to pre-fetch results to make it look nifty” stuff about which I was talking to myself. And I had just inadvertently taken this woman’s skill set and pretty much compared it to preschool in terms of complexity.
So in an effort to preserve dignity, I rejoin with “Oh, so you do CSS style sheets and that.”

“Yes,” comes her reply, “and I tell the programmers what I want and they build it.”

So I blather on a bit about the advantages of Ruby and its XPath object, and how you can scrape the data from web pages and store it in strings. Her eyes start to glaze over a bit, and I realized I’ve hit the knowledge frontier with her.

Another day, another story.

In Memoriam: Chewie NoMiddleName Jones, 1996(?)-2007

We let Chewie go to Doggie Heaven earlier today.

Last night, she was having difficulty breathing, and it was requiring more and more effort to breathe for her. So, we decided today was the day.

I remember when she first came into our lives as a cute little abandoned puppy. Her ears didn’t even stand straight up at that point, but she had enough moxie to battle with Rambo, the king of the house at that time.

True to her name, she was known for chewing things as a puppy — wallpaper, rocks, cans, you name it. After going to training at K9 University, she was much better behaved, but she still had a propensity to be boisterous.

Earlier in her life, she was a great leaper. She could spring nearly five feet in the air from a standing position. However, after she tore her Medial Colateral Ligament and required surgery to get it repaired, she didn’t do much leaping. In an unfortunate run-in with a vehicle, her hip had to be popped back into its socket earlier this year. She came through that with flying colors. However, little did we know that cancer was invading her body until she started showing no interest in food and losing weight.
Chewie was wonderful with kids. She never snapped at Jacob or Jessie even in the face of the abuse they unwittingly heaped on her.

But all good things come to an end. And with tumors invading her body, seeping blood into her lungs, it was time to say goodbye.

Goodbye, Chewie. We’ll miss you.