She Laughs at the Days

I get a lot of emails from the conservative Christian perspective because of the home school groups I'm in. One came through a while ago very upset about the show Good Christian B*tches . It complained that our religious freedoms are at stake, directly linked to the amount of mockery Christians receive in the public arena. If television companies are allowed to make fun of Christianity in ways that it doesn't make fun of other religions without someone crying foul then Christianity is on it's way out and we should be very afraid. Disrespect = threat So you know me. I had to see it for myself. Oh, how I laughed. You know what makes something funny? Something is funny if there is a nugget of truth in it, no matter how exaggerated it may be for comic effect. I know the people who are upset about this show are probably not the same people the show is making fun of, they just happen to share a very broad religious designation that encompasses all sorts of different opin

I finally read Hunger Games this weekend. I can see why everyone is fascinated. It's a really compelling story. The world creation, the plot, and the characters, are all well drawn and it took me a while to notice the problem with Katniss. Don't get me wrong, she's a very interesting character. As a reader I care about her success and her struggle. I just wonder if anyone else thinks it's odd that compared to almost every other person in the book she has no character at all, not of the moral kind that is. Katniss is a very good portrayal of a girl who survives, who has lived through trauma, who does what she needs to do to get what she needs to get. She has only formed deep attachments with one or 2 other people in her life. She is so narcissistic that she can't even see the possibility that someone else isn't playing the game and has a goal other than winning or survival in mind. Noble ideals are foreign to her. I'm sure this is deliberate on the pa

Because of the film Kony2012 everyone in America, and that means most of the resot of the people on the planet as well, have become enthusiastically aware of a serious aspect of evil in the world. Invisible Children is amazing. They have just performed the single most impressive awareness campaign ever. EVER. What is more, it isnʼt finished. They have set the bar and set it high. As with any time someone blows away the paradigm there has been some criticism . Mostly that they are not doing something about the problem. Against this there have been even excellent defenses .But I don't really want to talk about that. What too many people forget is that we are all in this together . Everyone who is about making the world a better place is on the same team . To put it in business terms, all of us in the aid and development “industry” are units within the “Global Transformation Company”. We are all united in the same goal and to the same purpose . Our struggle is not against each

I had a different post scheduled and I will put it up later today, but I couldn't let it post without first writing this. Last night I opened up facebook to find that someone I know died suddenly and tragically and I am just very sad. The last time I saw Echo she was probably only about 12 years old, it was 2000. (For those of you counting I would have been 23.) I had known her for several years by then. Her family attended the same church as mine so we saw each other regularly. She was different from a lot of other kids, dreamy and earnest and desperately wanting someone to shower her with affection and love. She was a bit odd, eccentric even and trying to hard to fit in. I was very fond of her. I don't know the exact path that let that sweet and loving little girl toward a drug addiction, nor do I know what route took her to the place she ended up yesterday, coughing up blood without being able to stop, but it's not hard for me to imagine. There has been a lot o

Dear Bam Bam, Sometime in the past few months you have gone all the way from toddler to little boy, a little boy who doesn't talk yet. You are fun, so much fun, and super intense. You want to PLAY! You smile and laugh and giggle, and ask for more: more tickles, more swinging around, more of looking at me. You are all alive, brilliantly, brightly alive. I could not believe you were strong enough to lower yourself down here, but you were and did it over and over again. For 3 days we fought about whether or not you would sit in your highchair to eat. I forced you into it and strapped you down, you angrily refused to eat, I refused to let you eat unless you were sitting down. It took until 2pm for you to eat anything that one day. And then I saw you climb your way onto the bench at the table between your brother and your sister and look proudly at each of them, laughing when you saw them laugh, imitating their gestures and pulling yourself up tall, so proud to be one o

When I was 4 my mom went to the hospital to give birth to my little sister and my grandmother came to take care of us for a few days while she was there. My mom and I had spent quite a lot of time going through my clothes and choosing outfits for me to wear for each day that she was gone. The second day that my grandmother was there I came upstairs wearing the second outfit that my mom and I had picked out. Her reaction, not knowing of this arrangement, was to tell me to get back to my room right now and change into the clothes I was wearing the day before. They weren't dirty yet and I shouldn't make more work for my mother by wearing fresh clothes when the clothes I had already worn could be worn a second time. What followed was a knock down drag out fight in which my old school grandma forcibly changed me into my other clothes while I screamed in protest the entire time and cried the rest of the day because of it. My mom was mad and I believe came home a day earlier tha

I found these photos last night that I took sometime last year. BamBam and Little were watching me through the baby gate so I started taking pictures. This is back when BamBam tried to eat everyone he loves. Actually, he still does that on occasion. They make me smile. look how little he was.

Thursday we decided last minute to head to the Wild Animal Park. It was chilly, I wasn't expecting much, but the kids have season passes that were a gift so it's no big deal if the day isn't perfect, we can always go back. I'm glad we went. We walked up to condor ridge for the first time, and past it to the old world garden. Crazy, crazy looking plants. There was no one else there, for quite a while, so we walked and explored and had lots of fun. Pretty Funny BamBam blowing raspberries. The Boy has his own camera now, a very early digital passed on by the great grandparents. They posed for him, but wouldn't for me. Happy a boy with room to run butterfly dreams He loves this little tunnel rockstar pose baby elephant nursing Real A mud hut in the Nairobi themed playground is a replica of many family's real and only home. stop taking pictures and give me pretzels