I’m Baaaaaack!

**cough, cough** Whoa, the dust around here is something else!

Let's see...can I even remember how to do this?  What? There’s a new format on Blogger?

Apparently it’s been a while since I last blogged!

Somewhere back during the summer I fell a little behind on my blog posts and couldn't seem to get caught up.  Then I began babysitting our friends baby a few days a week, and that combined with the drop-off and pick-up schedule of our younger son's afternoon Kindergarten class hasn't left me with a whole lot of free time to keep up here (or anywhere else, truth be told).  Some days it’s all I can do to keep the laundry caught up and dinner on the table.

However, I am still in the bloggy neighborhood and have so much to share...please don't hold my temporary blog negligence against me? 

One of the things I so enjoy about blogging is that folks can just pick right up where they left off before, and that’s just what I intend to do.

So that I don't completely overwhelm myself right off the bat, this one will simply be a braggy bloggy post about some more recent happenings.

To start with, I've been doing a whole lot of this these days while waiting in school parking lots and to relax late at night.

Among our former youth group kids from recent years, there's been something of a baby boom, and I have found the need to have something to take to all the showers.

This was one of my favorite color schemes to work up in the ripple pattern. The reddish looking stripe is actually a very beautiful magenta yarn by Vanna (the Vanna, from Wheel of Fortune). It’s been ages since I’ve watched her show, but I know this…that lady knows how to select colors and texture when it comes to yarn!

Here was a fun little acorn cap I made for Baby Jack using the blackberry salad stitch:

I'm not sure why, but I’ve found that of my more relaxing past-times these days is watching a good DVD series put out by BBC while crocheting in the evenings.  Somebody pass me some Geritol...I think I'm gettin' old!

I’ll admit, it’s kind of a strange feeling when the youth group teens that you worked with way back are suddenly getting married and having kids left and right.

We comfort ourselves with the fact we've not yet had a second generation come through our class at church. I hear that's when it's all over, haha.

* * * *

A few days ago, I cleaned out Judah's 'folder' from school (which is the Kindergarten version of the pony-express) through which we receive any important notifications from his teacher.

Among the 'graded' papers we pulled out were these gems:

Around Halloween he began drawing these like crazy.

Bats adorned EVERYTHING. 

As we moved into winter, a blank house was sent home and the children were supposed to use found objects at home to transform their papers into gingerbread houses.

In an entry I’ve entitled, “Unclear on the concept” this was what he came up with:

He insisted he was supposed to have cotton balls for snow, but the rest he wanted to do with his little watercolor paint set.  I offered grains, beans, cereal and even red hots candies, but nope, he was going to do the rest in watercolors.  (I could hardly argue, as I can still remember the thrill of using one of those cheapo watercolor sets as a child.  All the little ovals set into the white tray and filled in with bright cakes of color and the brush lying down the center ready to pour your imagination onto paper.)

So the cotton balls could resemble snow, and I give him kudos on the snowflakes which he painstakingly made with his newly acquired skill for writing the letter Y, with a brush that wasn’t exactly fine tipped. 

The rest, however, was completely freestyle.  Orange birds (because, as we all know, there are just so many of those out at Christmas time), a self portrait of him standing beneath the window along with what I first thought was a cat, but he informs me was his puppy.  And for reasons completely unknown to me, there is also an octopus.  It’s brown.  All in all, quite ‘gingerbread house-ish’, don’t you think?

I took a photograph of his amazing Nativity Scene around Christmas, but being that it’s not with the rest of my photo files, I have a sinking feeling that it was on my old cell phone which is no longer in service.  The bat-capes on Joseph and some of the wise men were awesome.

By far, however, our favorite one was this:

I like teacher!

She even gave him a sticker for his creativity.

I’m thinking that in her haste to correct two classes worth of work, she probably didn’t look at it very closely.

Which is probably a good thing.

* * * *

This past week, Judah received notification that the story he entered in his Young Authors competition at school was selected as one of the winners to be published!

"Here's your camera bag, mom...can you take a pitcher of me with my award by this wall?"

Not sure that smile can stretch much further across his face, but he was soooo proud.  “It’s gonna be in a book?  A REAL book?”

My kindergartener got published before me.  **sigh**

* * * *

Jericho recently wrote a paper on why Creation should be taught as a viable explanation for the Origin of Life.  It was for an Honors English project, and included a visual presentation along with his speech. 

He ended up getting 198/200 points possible (which was great), but what I was most proud of was that he stood up for what he believes, and the class even applauded him at the end of his speech!

So proud of those boys!

I also have to tell a good one on Jeff.

Back when we first moved to this desert (14+ years ago now), Jeff worked at a trucking company as a supervisor.  At that time, it was located just down the highway from a ‘gentlemans club’ (of the type that true gentleman would not set foot in).  There were several times where some of the guys at work would invite him out after their shift to drink and frequent that seedy establishment, but always, he politely declined.

This brought about a lot of good-natured teasing on the docks at work, and earned him the nickname Ned Flanders.

When he eventually got back into teaching, his reputation preceded him.  In fact, over the years I would venture to say that his integrity and ethics have only gotten stronger.  He’s a keeper, that one.

In fact, there have been numerous times in which his boss at work has caught him in the act of doing good deeds, and not because he was trying to make it known, but because she just happened to take his same route to school where that morning he was helping a student’s mom change her tire in the rain on the way to work, or happened to walk by his classroom another morning before school and saw him praying for a fellow teacher whose wife was going in for surgery.

More recently, while walking through the student commons area where his students were eating lunch, he stopped to chat with a proctor who seemed like she was having a really rough day.  Turns out she was having some problems at home and felt like her whole world was falling apart.  Jeff, caring guy that he is, stopped right there and prayed for she and her husband.

A few days later, he saw her again and asked how things were going.She brightened, “They’re going great!  We’ve had some really good communication lately, and things are on the upswing.  In fact, I’ve even given up smoking!”

A couple weeks later, Jeff bumped into her yet again in one of the outdoor hallways during passing time and stopped to ask how she was faring.  “Marriage wise, things are great, but my horse (which she’d apparently had for years) died unexpectedly, and it was so hard on me…well, I took up smoking again.”

Now Jeff had been filling me in on these little updates from time to time.

But the latest and best one happened this past week.  I’d asked Jeff to swing by the bank on his way home, and as he was coming out the door, he glanced up and saw that same coworker step out of her car, flick a cigarette to the ground and grind it into the pavement. 

She stepped up over a curb onto the sidewalk and spotted Jeff standing there.  Rolling her eyes she joked, “Man, it’s like Jesus just caught me smoking!”

Bwahahaha!

While we do try to live our daily lives in a humble and Christ-like manner, and are pleased when anyone recognizes in us glimpses of the God we serve, we’d be the first to tell you that we are not perfect.  We stumble.  We fail.  Being human, we consistently fall far short of the mark.

We’re just average folks, trying to let our lights shine in a dark world.

And hey, if that makes us a little strange…so be it.

Of course, there is the very real possibility that we truly are just…strange.

It’s just how we roll.