Monthly Archives: August 2005

Gender Defender

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I have run into various parents that for whatever reason do not want to know what gender their baby is going to be. This is a really, really odd thing for me and something I don’t understand. Therefore, I’ve put a lot of thought into what may be the motivation for this decision. Unfortunately, since I’m a bit of a nut-job and because I have an over-active imagination I’ve come up with the following set of thoughts:

You are going to find out what gender your child is at some point in time, aren’t you? What is the problem with finding out 6 or 4 or 2 months early? If you’re not going to find out, why not hire a nurse, nanny and child care staff and then you could have the baby, ask the nurse to cover the baby up before you see the ‘lower’ part of the baby and then you’d still not know. Further, you could only see the child for non-diaper changing or bathroom related times. To help stave off any actual gender related concerns you could name the child Terry, Leslie, Kerry or Pat. Furthermore you could attempt to limit your child’s exposure to anything gender related as a whole and therefore call yourself and your parental partner parent unit one and parent unit two.

Then, of course, one day you will not that several things may happen:
Shaving, buying of feminine products, voice changes and of course the real gender identifyer hygeine products in general. It is my opinion that if it is a boy these products may not go up in demand until maybe 16 or 17 as most boys don’t figure out bathing until they realize girls care about that sort of thing. But I digress…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not finding out until the baby is born – that’s something that each parent (set) needs to figure out – but we wanted to find out so we could start buying tampons early, I figure there’s gonna be a major price increase on those some day, just like oil, and we’ll have a major stockpile.

Grahamz-Its

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OK, so we’re out of Cheez-Its. This is not insurmountable because I can easily shred some cheese onto graham crackers and throw them into our toaster oven. It doesn’t quite taste the same but sometimes you just have to make due. I find that cheesy cinnamon graham crackers are tasty, but not quite as good as other forms of biscuits with cheese. Abby finally had to get a knife out and hold me up for the last of the Goldfish crackers. It’s getting pretty bad… I think I need help.

If I could only find a way to just stop snorting the powder from the bottom of the Cheez-It bag I think I’d be OK. The worst problem with this is that it coagulates in my nasal passage and I find myself coughing up ‘cheezburgers’ every once in a while. I think I can stop if I could just switch over to rye-krisps or wasa bread. I hear that other cracker-heads have been able to get off of crackers all together and just form habits with safer substances like french bread, ice berg lettuce or sunflower seeds. Its mostly the habit of putting the crackers in my mouth and getting the crunch sensation so I’m pretty sure that if I find another source of crunch I’ll be off Scott Peterson Free. Wait, no, he’s not free. Dang, these glutenous goodies are going to do me in.

Cut the Cheese, Daddy

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This morning after riding my bike Abby asked me to come downstairs with her and play kitchen. I agreed as I haven’t played kitchen with her in a very long time (yes, I’m a neglectful dad in the playing kitchen department, for some reason I feal ill equipped for this task). She carefully hand-selected a block of plastic cheese, a plastic red delicious apple and placed them in her clear-vision pot. She placed the pot on the burner which immediately erupted with the sound of boiling water. The water reached its peak boiling temperature and she grabbed the scalding foods out of the pot and placed them onto a plate for me. She then got a knife and fork out and demanded I cut… the cheese.

Bike. Ride. Ing

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This morning I woke up at 5:30. I immediately hopped out of bed like a spry young man wanting to go physically exert himself so as to maintain his fit physique. Actually, Jessica said, “Did you hear that?” when the alarm went off. I did. I also wanted to immediately go back to sleep. However, I decided that if ever I was going to whip this last 25 pounds I’ve wanted to take off ever since I moved to Denver I was going to have to actually get out of bed and work out.

So I went riding and it was fantastic! The sun hadn’t really come up yet and so it was light but not overly bright, and the coolness of the night was still hanging around (the Denver region is rather diurnal). What a wonderful exercise bicycling is. I got to see lots of flowers, some ducks, cars, sidewalk and the Cherry Creek Reservoir [which doesn’t look as nasty from down here as it does from space, apparently]. Good times.

Top Ten Reasons Why the Ten Commandments Are Not for New Testament Saints

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This is partially taken from Lectures in Systematic Theology by Henry C. Thiessen. It is a work in progress. What other ideas/verses would you add? I need to cite everything here so please be patient with me 🙂

  1. The believer is delivered from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:10).
  2. The believer is delivered from the penalty of the law.
  3. The believer is delivered from the law itself (Romans 7:4, Ephesians 2:14-15; Colossians 2:14,20).
  4. The ten commandments have faded away (II Corinthians 3:7-11).
  5. The believer is seated in the heavenlies [the law is for the earth] (Colossians 3:1-3).
  6. The law is not just the ten commandments, there are 613 commands.
  7. The law was given to the Jews to set them apart from the rest of the world.
  8. Noah, Abraham, Moses and David were all saved by faith and not the law.
  9. The Temple no longer exists which makes fulfilling the law impossible.
  10. Jesus fulfilled the law and we are hidden in Him (Colossians 3:1-3).

The Church

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I am starting to think about things that I haven’t thought about for a while: semantics. When people use the term ‘the church’ what do they convey? The word has various meanings in various contexts and I don’t want to try to force a singular meaning on it – that’d be just confusing and a lot of work for me to try to start an international campaign 🙂 Instead I want to take a brief look at the uses and then suggest care in using it in some contexts.

Meanings:

The Church
A building in which people of a Christian denomination come together (in contrast to a temple, mosque or Community Center)
The Church
A group of people that are gathered together in a particular building or that area associated with a particular denomination’s meeting place. Example: The Assemblies of God Church in Carson City is called Capital Christian Center.
The Church
The bride of Christ as defined by being a believer in Christ and not being associated with a denomination or meeting location.

It is this last definition that most concerns me. I recently read a statement wherein the person said [roughly], “The church has been judgmental in the past.” This is a sticky wicket and I wouldn’t normally even want to touch it. Here’s my concern though: by using the singular, universal term for Christians throughout history regardless of denomination or adherence to the authority of scripture you are painting with too broad a brush. Also, by doing this you’re actually defining the church differently compared to how the Bible teaches it to be on a doctrinal level. Practicioners of a religion do not necessarily represent the religion in its pure, ideal form.

I’m not suggesting that we white-wash church history so as to always appear as if all believers throughout history were abiding in the Holy Spirit and acting as God’s messengers in all things, but I am suggesting that we be careful how we use the church. The Bride of Christ has been made perfect by her redeemer/groom, Christ. We are sanctified in Him, perfected in Him and presentable to Him (see Ephesians 5 for this last reference). Let us not forget this when trying to interact with people and how we use the term ‘church.’ I’m sure I need to be more careful myself, but I do want to remind believers that by representing the church as anything but a redeemed group we short sell our savior.

Like Sanding an Hour Glass

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I got a DeWalt sander a month or two ago for a refinishing project I never got to (Yes! My first non-started project for the house). However, yesterday I got to use it on our kitchen cabinet doors and it rocks! Actually, it doesn’t rock. It sands smoothly with very little vibration. I have used several different sanders in the past and this one by far holds the record for the most useful sander with the least user fatigue.

If you find yourself needing to sand something and don’t need an orbital or belt sander for the project (and you better find out what kind of sander you need or you could be sorry) this is a very, very nice sander.

End of Summer

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The end of summer is rapidly approaching… I could tell because today at lunch while running an errand the two young boys who live across the street were just sitting with their dog watching tree trimmers/groomers cutting the neighbors trees into better shape. Yup, they were officially bored enough to watch adults work at cutting trees.

I don’t think I ever got that bored, but I’m sure I complained about not being entertained at all times. Fortunately they’ll be back to school in a few weeks.

Look Who’s Little

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Evy
These are a bit rough, but you get what you pay for. Wait! I payed a lot of money for these. Oh well 🙂 Here’s Evy’s ultrasound pics.

You’ll note these are just face shots, but we only got glamour shots done. Plus, full body shots potentially could get me in trouble for posting naughty pictures of children, which I can’t afford to do.

Sorry for the darkness, but I couldn’t really get it to clean up without a lot more time and effort put in.
Evy Close Up

And Now for Something Completely… Scary

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In this, the tenth episode of the Pordcast, you’ll learn why some people shouldn’t emulate their parents, and why some parents shouldn’t tell their children and the whole Internet about what they did as children.

Let me be the first to say, “Abby, do as I say, not as I did.”

File size: a little under 4 MB
Length: Near 8 minutes
Content: Randy Peterman talking about the crazy side of parenting
No intro music, no outro music… just talk like some AM radio stations.