Too much to cover: Big-kid friends, "Glee", and cultural myths

Tuesdays are always a busy day because of Life Group, and last night was our turn to cook, which only compounds things further.  (Though hubby's "breakfast for dinner" appeared to be a big hit, we were a little low attendance-wise, so it looks like leftover breakfast will be for dinner for the rest of the week.)

Then, due to a juxtaposition of circumstances, we didn't have a babysitter for the kids.  So while the grown-ups talked and read downstairs, I stayed upstairs with my 21-month-old son and a just-turned-5-years-old boy I often teach in Children's Church.

The two of them had a blast, and I'm sure our friends' son crashed just as hard as mine did when he got home.  But in the course of wearing themselves out, they really wore me out.

Read more »

What does a Christian look like?

The other day on my way to work, I had to stop at the gas station by my house to fill my car up.  (Off-topic, but $40 to fill up the 12-gallon tank of a sub-compact?  Really?)

Now, this gas station is at a strange juxtaposition of subdivision, bus stop, Mexican grocery mart, and downtown.  You get a very broad range of customers patronizing the gas station and attached convenience store.

I normally stop there early in the morning, and I like watching the different types of people that mill around there.  There's a homeless guy who rides a bike around my neighborhood, and he often stops there to pick up a Fuze brand sports drink that he carries around in a basket on the front of his bicycle.

Early in the morning, the delivery guys are normally there, too, dropping off the shipments of soft drinks and beers.  Construction workers and contractors gas up their big, heavy-duty pickups and grab some of the cheap kwik-e-mart coffee.  I see other office workers, women pumping gas in high heels and pant suits.

This morning, there was a big American sedan at the pump next to me.  It was full of older ladies, dressed like they were on their way to a fancy Easter service (fabulous hats with silk flowers and all).  I wondered if maybe they were going to a convention, since it was 7:00 am on a weekday morning.

I set the nozzle to automatic fill, and sat back down in my car to start on my day's Bible reading.  (I like to do my reading before work in the morning.)  A few moments later, I heard a tap on my window.

Read more »

Where is the pill for men?: Part 2

(...continued from Part 1.)  Hormonal contraceptives work via four steps.  Each subsequent step is a back-up of the prior steps, i.e., if the first step fails, the second step comes into play, if they both fail, then the third step is utilized, etc.  Here are the steps.

Read more »

Where is the pill for men?: Part 1

Some of the most important decisions we make in raising kids is deciding when we want to do so.  We want to wait until we've been married a little while, our finances are better, our health is better, when our first kid's a little older, etc.  You know you want to have a kid (or another kid) someday, just maybe not today.

And, thanks to modern medicine, women have a ton of options when it comes to delaying pregnancy.  So it falls to us to figure out how we want to do that.  And the husbands just let us be the ones to take care of it.

Well, I'm sick of it.  Maybe it's just me, but it's my personal opinion that birth control sucks.  I'll even run you down the list and tell you what I hate about every method.

Read more »

I'm an ambulance-chaser.

First a bit of background: My husband generally picks my son up from daycare, as he gets off before I do. Today, due to circumstances at his work, I had to pick my son up. Both of our workplaces and my son's preschool are very close to our house. One main road takes me from my office, past my husband's workplace, past my house, and to my son's preschool. Okay, got it? Eh, close enough.

I had just pulled onto the main road off my office's campus when sirens interrupted my wailing along with the radio. (I was listening to Taylor Swift very loudly, and between her twang and my singing, didn't hear the sirens at first.) I pulled over to the side and, once the ambulance passed, got into the lane behind it.

Then it turned right. And I realized that it was heading down the road that leads to my husband's work. And my son's preschool.

Read more »

Sanitizing the Bible: Explaining ancient Judaic wedding customs to 3-year-olds

Everyone remember the story of Jesus's first miracle? You know...He was at a wedding and the guests were upset because their celebratory beverages were running low, so he turned water into wine. (Or, if you're Southern Baptist, you can pretend it was "grape juice". Just kidding; I love you crazy fundies.)

Anyway, in my preschoolers children's church this past week, we were talking to the kids about helping our friends, like Jesus helped his in the story. Now, every week as we're telling the story, we ask the kids questions to get them to interact, since it would require sorcery or thorazine to get toddlers to sit still quietly for 10 minutes.

Being that I'm one of the teachers, their answers to questions normally border somewhere between "hilarious" and "disastrous". Fortunately, I was not the one telling the story this week, so all I had to do was try to stifle laughter and wrangle younguns (similar to cat-herding) while my friend taught the kids.

Here's what we got:

Read more »

Sanitizing the Bible: When Christianity isn't baby-friendly

For those who may not be aware, the Bible is not PG. Not even PG-13. There are more than enough passages to warrant a solid R rating.

I'm not just referring to the obvious stuff either, like Song of Solomon, or the massacre of the innocents. There is some very depraved and raunchy stuff in the Bible. :cough: Lot's daughers :cough:

But you don't normally think about that stuff. Or, at least, I don't. Normally, when I remember things from the Bible, I just think of the books I really enjoy, like Galatians, or Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes. (A really cool and visual verse is Ecclesiastes 10:1, "Dead flies doth cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour, so doth a little folly ruin a reputation for wisdom and honour." The unnecessary "u"s should be indication that I learned it in the Old King James version.)

But a couple of months back, our church charged us with trying to read all the way through the Bible in a year. They even gave us handy little reading charts that break it up so you read about three chapters a day, two from Old Testament and one from New. (The idea is that you have the New Testament there to help you get through some of the really slow parts in the Old Testament. Can you imagine reading nothing but Leviticus for a month? I've tried to do it in the past, and it was mentally painful.)

It's always been a goal of mine to read through the whole Bible, so I joined a small group with two other women in my congregation and we meet once a week to hold each other accountable and discuss what we thought of that week's reading. I even started looking back through the toddler-friendly collection of Bible stories I got my son as an infant, figuring he's about to the age where he can enjoy it, and relate it back to the stories they're learning in class.

It was in comparing my adult, big-girl Bible and my son's "Bible" that I realized just how much they had to leave out. And, even worse, how much more they should have left out.

Read more »