It’s snowing, it’s snowing, it’s snowing!

Child 2:

I wish there was more snow.

• Anne graduated from Preschool today. She had two excellent teachers this year and is sad to be done. Makes me wonder if she will be like Jason in Foxtrot. She was very beautiful in the dress her Grandma got her.
• We have been house hunting and found what we hope will be our next accommodations. We put in an offer which was accepted, but contingent on the sellers closing on another house. It has been a while since we bought a house, but amazingly enough, I think the process is even longer in Maryland compared to NewYork.
• Anne got pneumonia today. Very sad. So she will be taking antibiotics for a little while. No clue where she got it from and we hope that no other kids get/got it.
• I started another blog revolving around my coding for the MMORPG I play. Knowing me, I will probably update that one more than this..
• We are getting plugged into our church. I have been periodically helping lead the home group we go to. We love our home group, and we have felt warmly accepted into the community. I managed to get out skiing once with some of them. I think I will miss winter down here.
• Work continues to go well. Just hired someone to work under me and in the process of hiring another (in case anyone wants to send me a resume). I am really enjoying the Zend Framework but unfortunately I had to drop the smarty templates as they were killing the speed. Our hardware has killer I/O but awful CPU speed.
• On my daily commute I have been reading a very good book: As For Me and My House. I wish I had read it while in grad school. I know it would have helped me better understand myself and the stresses I place upon Camille. Better late than never. It is written in a very poetic style (not my style) which took a bit to get used to. While at home, I have been reading Fit Bodies Fat Minds. Another highly recommended read. It is not poetic and more my reading style.
• We have not gone to the movies in a while now. I think the last movie we saw was Children of Men. We did rent some interesting films though. An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, and Thank You For Smoking. They raise interesting questions, especially for a stats minded person like myself. The first 2 are more of the documentary type. The last one can get you thinking about how media and sophistry pervade and sway our culture.

So, hopefully Camille will post here soon to give everyone an update on some of the other important things going on in our lives.

We are now all settled in Maryland. I drove up to Ithaca and brought Camille and the kids back down at the end of October. I am so glad we are all together again. I’ll try to have Camille give a larger update about how things are soon.

We drove back up to Ithaca for Christmas and New Years. It was good to see my parents again, and all our NewLife friends. We managed to get some good fossil hunting in as well, as the temperatures were not ‘normal’. Anne and Drew are becoming good hunters, with Anne scoring a few trilobites herself at the Portland Point quarry.

Today, being MLKJ Day, I had the day off. Woohoo! Being in the DC area is great! It was a normal temperature for January 15th, 72F with a 50 percent chance for rain. So we made the best of it and went to the Chesapeake to hunt for Miocene fossils. We managed to score a small amount of fossilized shark and skate teeth. It was warm enough for me to put on my Tevas and walk around in the water to better hunt. Pretty fun! Plus, having Drew periodically say, “Shark eat me” was great.

A few nights ago, I was talking with a friend about our daughters and how they relate with other people. They’re both at the same preschool. So we hear similar stories about stuff. These kids are 3-5 years old and already exhibit junior high mentality. Yikes.

Anne is friends with two other girls that go to our church. They’re all the same age. Anne has always connected well with one girl more than the other. So when the three of them are together, it’s almost always odd man out. I almost started to cry one time at church when I saw the little girl left behind or left out of everything Anne and her other friend were doing. Anne was completely oblivious and I was aching for the third little girl who was following them, asking to join in and eventually just standing there watching. All memories of elementary and junior high school came flooding back with all the feelings of isolation and longing.

A friend of mine once commented that we don’t need to shield our children from experiencing pain in relationships. It’s those experiences that help create empathy, compassion, other-awareness that not much else can do. I can see that in my life. I think my unhappiness growing up has helped to shape the way I see people so that I notice the loner in the corner of the room and try to draw them into conversation.

I can see that now, but it’s easier said than done. It’s a lot easier to set up an environment where children are carefully exposed and nurtured. It’s a lot harder to watch your child struggle with hurt and disappointment and hope in faith that God will use that to build character. I do hope Anne and Drew will grow up to be compassionate, caring and sensitive people. And I also hope I will have the strength to walk with them through those painful moments and not try to shield them from it all or try to solve it for them.

Yes, it was someone’s birthday and they had a pinata (/pinyata/). If you do not know, a pinata is (now-a-days) a paper mache’ object filled usually with candy which one tries to break open with a bat. The custom apparently goes back to the orient.

At first I remembered one of Dave Barry’s great columns on a party with a “Cinderella” pinata. His telling is quite humorous (and equally disturbing) if you can picture little kids trying to literally beat the stuffing out of Cinderella. Well, this party did not have Cinderella thankfully.

So, naturally curious I had to find out if it was Cinderella or her malnourished twin sister Belle. Alas, it was a blue VW Beetle design. Last time it was a birthday cake shaped pinata which makes sense. But a VW Bug for a pinata? Must have been a boy’s birthday. I guess a tank would be more appropriate here in Ithaca with the “No War” crowd. Or an elephant dressed in red so the parents can enjoy watching their kids demolish the symbol of the republican party. Or, maybe the store ran out.

Did you know that you can get talking pinatas that will say something every time you hit them? You can get a red-white-blue elephant (or donkey) that exudes wisdom with “Uncle Sam Wants You” and other things. At least the watermellon pinata says “Youch!” The brontosaurus is probably the coolest with taunts like: “Bring it on caveman” and “What? Are you extinct?”

Round after round they beat in the hood, smashed the windows, and dented the fenders of the Beetle with a large red plastic bat (The Club?) in an attempt to obtain the goodies inside. Ahh, the next generation of vandals and their friends are 100ft from me. Great. Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that they are only 5-6 years old. Ten years from now they will be using crowbars and lock-pick guns to get into my car only to find that some 10-year old beat them to the stock, low-tech stereo system. I am going to start training my kids next week.