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My mom has bought quite a few books for Madeline, and several of them are from British publishers. One contained the following sentences, in a list of what was eaten at several times throughout the day: “What is for pudding? It’s ice cream for pudding. Yipee!” Wow, how confusing is that to an American kid? If we let Madeline read too many books like that, she is going to have some real spelling confusion. ‘Programme’ and ‘Favourite’ aren’t too bad but ‘pyjamas’ is right out!

Another book contained some…well, “interesting” rhymes and poems such as:

“Three Wise Men of Gotham”

Three Wise Men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl:
And if the bowl had been stronger
My song would have been longer.

“Solomon Grundy”

Solomon Grundy
Born on Monday
Christened on Tuesday
Married on Wednesday
Sick on Thursday
Worse on Friday
Died on Saturday
Burried on Sunday
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy.
—-

Okay, that first one is just odd, but the second one is kind of disturbing for children’s literature if you ask me. Though, I guess no more disturbing in some ways than the morbid classic “Rock-a-bye baby” where the cradle is presumably falling from several feet in the air. How did these become classics, anyway? It would certainly be interesting to know.

I’m happy to report that for the first time in about five or six weeks, I’ve uploaded pictures to our photo gallery. We had taken so many pictures over the holidays that the task of getting even a sampling of them onto the website seemed dauting. Enter Picasa2, a free photo manager from our friends at Google. I downloaded it out of sheer curiosity, but it has turned out to be a useful tool for sorting through the heaps of pictures that Tony loves to take on our new camera using the “quick multiple shots mode.”

If you are a digital camera user, I highly recommend Picasa. It will index all the photos and movies on your hard drive, give you a few simple image-editing tools to spruce them up, and allow you to select and group pictures for ease of printing, uploading or posting. I’m sure it even has a few other features too that I haven’t discovered yet.

Without further ado, here are the new albums for you to enjoy:

Stonebrook Staff Christmas Party, December 2004
Madeline Album from Late December 2004
Christmas Morning in St Cloud
Faithwalkers Conference
Our New Years Eve Party
Snow Football on January 5th, 2005
Jason and Leah’s Wedding
Madeline Album for January, 2005 (with pics taken thru yesterday)

I actually didn’t quite get through all the pictures…I still have other family Christmas pictures to sort through and upload a few highlights. Now that this glut of pictures is up in the gallery, I should be able to keep up better and post on a more regular basis once again. Happy Viewing!

[album:37,1]

I don’t know why I waited so long! Today, I made homemade salsa for the first time. My inspiration came last week at the RCA Fellowship Team’s new event, a weekly off campus dinner for the non-dormies on our team. Tacos were on the menu that night, and I could tell the salsa was not from a jar. I asked Anne Swales, the creator of the salsa, if she used fresh tomatoes, and she replied that she had used tomatoes from a can. Aha! Why didn’t I think of that before?

No more waiting for tomatoes to go on sale; no need to spend a great deal of time cooking and chopping tomatoes…I would just use pre-chopped canned tomatoes from fareway. My salsa contained one can chopped tomatoes from fareway, one can chopped tomatoes w/green chiles from Aldi, a handful of chopped onions (did you know they sell pre-chopped frozen onions for 89 cents a bag at Fareway? I discovered that this week too), a generous portion of garlic poweder, a few good dashes of chili powder, and my favorite salsa ingredient, cilantro. After a quick run through in the blender, I had salsa with near-perfect flavor (at least nearly perfect for what I look for in a good salsa) on the first try! I had hoped for a little chunkier texture, but next time I will just blend it a little less I guess. It tasted great on our mexican baked fish, quesadillas, and tortilla chips. What a great cooking adventure.

In other news, Madeline has learned to pull herself up to a standing position on the couch and up to her leapfrog activity table. No foot movement yet, but walking along the furniture can’t be far behind.

I actually started writing a serious post…an analysis of an interesting trend I’ve been reading about…but that was just taking too long to write, so it will not appear until another time. Something to look forward to I guess!

Tony introduced me to Slashdot soon after we got married, and within months I was hooked. Their tagline is “News For Nerds, Stuff that Matters.” Topics range from computer industry rumors to sci-fi movie news to gaming to just about anything else tech or scientifc related. While I have learned a great deal through reading the articles and comments, I often find that the finer details of the more scientific or technological stories are beyond my grasp while quickly scanning the material.

Yesterday, Slashdot finally posted a story for “language geeks” like me. The title of the story is “Using the Web for Linguistic Research.” Finally, a techie story where I can understand all the terms and concepts with little effort! I certainly enjoyed the comments various users posted, but the real treat was discovering a blog called “The Language Log” that was linked to in the story. It’s a blog kept by several linguists who discuss current issues and practices in the field of linguistics. Brain candy for me!!!

I developed an interest in linguistics while working on my English degree at Iowa State. I discovered the field too late in my college career to seriously consider switching majors, but I did end up taking several classes in the discipline and pondered the thought of going to grad school to take up the study of linguistics (with an emphasis in the field of computational linguistics, an area of study some of the contributers to the LanguageLog seem to favor). God called me into campus ministry instead, but I still find it quite entertaining to read what language professionals have to say.

Having found out we would in fact be going on vacation to San Diego, I immediately began one of my favorite parts of vacationing: making plans! I ordered my San Diego vacation info packet from the convention and visitors bureau, searched for the best price on plane tickets and started researching hotels.

We had been provided with a list of “official conference hotels,” so at first I just picked out the least expensive hotel from the list that had the features we were looking for (primarily an airport shuttle and free internet access). Even though the university will be picking up the hotel tab, we still didn’t want waste money on an extravagant hotel. On a hunch that I might be able to still find a better deal somewhere, I ventured beyond the official list and started searching for hotels on a few internet travel sites.

Amazingly, for the same price as the hotel I had picked out from the “official list,” I found one that was both much higher quality and much closer to the convention center where Tony’s meetings will be held. The Prava is described as a “boutique hotel” and features a small kitchen (complete with stove, full size fridge, dishwasher, microwave, pots, dishes, etc) in each room! Very handy when you don’t want to be forced to eat out for every meal while traveling! Though we will end up having to pay for our airport shuttle and internet access, the small cost of these two items seemed well worth the treat of being able to stay in a great hotel.

With our flight and hotel taken care of, all that’s left is some pre-planning of what we want to see and do while we’re there. The San Diego vacation packet arrived yesterday, and I’ve been doing some web browsing as well to read about local attractions and restaurants. I haven’t yet checked out a tour book from the Library, but I am sure I will get around to it before the time of our trip in March. Does it surprise anyone that I enjoy the planning and researching so much???

I actually have been to San Diego once before, on a family trip with my mom and step-dad when I was in seventh grade. Wow, that was about 15 years ago! I don’t remember a ton of details from that trip…I do remember going to Sea World and being very disappointed that the penguin display was closed for some reason. But we did get to see the killer whale show featuring “Baby Shamu.” My step-dad then jokes about Baby Shamu The Cute Killer Whale for years afterwards.

The other highlight of that family vacation was a “whale watching” cruise we took out on the ocean. I don’t even remember if we saw any whales. The memorable part of that excursion was my mom accidently breaking open a huge blister she had gotten on her hand as a result an unfortunate hot tea spill in the airport before our flight out. It was traumatic for all three of us, and somehow very funny to me looking back on it. (Although I doubt it was funny at all at the time!) My mom has traveled to San Diego several times since then and it is one of her favorite vacation destinations, but I don’t think she has ever gone whale watching again!

I’m looking forward to some new San Diego adventures this spring…which you can look forward to reading about here.

At some point a few months ago I started dreaming about how great it would be to take a vacation. While going to conferences is certainly great, I love the sightseeing, exploring and adventuring that comes with traveling somewhere for pleasure. I really didn’t think it was going to happen though, or at least that we wouldn’t end up going anywhere very far away or exciting. There are just far too many other things we need to do with our financial resources.

So, when Tony announced to me about a month ago that he had gotten a paper accepted to the American Chemical Society national conference in San Diego this March, I couldn’t help but be jealous! He was going to go somewhere warm in the middle of winter, even if it was more of a “business trip.” After voicing this sentiment aloud, Tony mentioned that maybe I could go too! Since the cost of his hotel room, airfare and meals are reimbursable to the university, we would only have to pay for my airfare and food. Madeline is young enough that she could come along for free!

It sounded like a wonderful idea. I would have time to do some sightseeing and exploring on my own, and we would be able to do some things together at night or in between sessions Tony would be interested in attending at the conference. But would even spending a few hundred dollars be wise? We left for our Christmas travels with that question still unanswered.

When we arrived home from the Faithwalkers conference, I found in the mail a card from my mom with a very generous gift enclosed. I had told her about the possibility of this trip while we were in Minnesota, and she wanted to help make it a reality for us without us having to strain our finances. My mom and step-dad had just refinanced their mortgage and got to skip a monthly payment as a part of the deal — they decided to pass this financial blessing on to us in the form of a gift to help us take this vacation.

On the way home from the conference I had just been stressing about God’s provision. Could I really trust Him to provide things that my heart desired, even if some of them were “unecessary” things like taking a vacation? I often fear that in the cause of doing what God wants me to do, I’ll be asked to give up all the little pleasures in life. And while I know I need to be willing to give up whatever He asks of me, His provision for me to take a vacation reminded me that isn’t just all about making things difficult to grow my character.

Lately instead of blogging and instead of [insert lots of other worthwhile activities here], I’ve been chasing Madeline around, as she has now developed the ability to crawl. I can no longer set her on the floor with a pile of toys and then go back to focusing on whatever is on my computer screen. She now wanders away from the pile of toys to look for lamp cords, stray pieces of paper, my cell phone, the stereo knobs, and many other things previously unknown to her.

My days now go a little bit like this: I work for a few minutes, then pull Madeline away from the forbidden objects, tell her “no”, go back to the computer (or the kitchen counter or where ever else I was working) and then repeat the process moments later. Okay, so she doesn’t do that all day long. And she still comes up with things to do that are amazingly cute. A couple of days ago she crawled behind the recliner in the living room and started banging on the heat vent with her hand for no apparent reason. Tony suggested she might be a percussionist in training. Besides crawling, Madeline is also getting more proficient at eating solid foods, and has worked her way up to cheerios, club crackers and tiny banana chunks along with the usual pureed fruits and vegetables.

The real sign of the times ahead came yesterday. I had tried to put Madeline down for a nap, but she didn’t seem to be falling asleep after about 10 minutes of crying. When I went in to check on her and discovered that she had pulled herself up to her knees and was perched at the edge of her crib with her head above the level of the crib railing. Time to lower the crib mattress! She has been trying to pull herself up to her feet against other pieces of furniture, but hasn’t quite developed the strength to get all the way to her feet yet.

With all of Madeline’s new abilities, we decided that Tony needed to make it his project to further “child-proof” our house. With the crib mattress lowered yesterday, priority number one was securing the stairwell! We still haven’t put the little plugs on the outlets or the extra locking mechanisms on the cabinets with harmful stuff in them, but she seems to be ignoring those things for now anyway, so we are probably safe at least for a few more days!

Here’s hoping that Madeline actually learns what “no” means sometime soon!

It’s a new year and I think it’s high time to get back into the blogging routine after a holiday hiatus of close to three weeks. We have hundreds of pictures to sort through so we should hopefully have pics of family Christmas gatherings (yeah, boring to most of you), Faithwalkers, and our highly exciting New Year’s Eve party posted soon.

Over the last few weeks we survived a $1200 car repair that thankfully ocurred before we got on the road, nearly a week and a half of traveling, about four or five Christmas celebrations, going to Faithwalkers with Madeline in tow (bringing a baby to a conference is tiring!), and returning home again to throw a new year’s party and then a birthday party for Naomi a couple nights later. Now I’m busily trying to finish my Daylights editing and do lots of pre-semester admin work all before our spring leaders retreat this weekend! Whew! What a crazy life!!!

My New Year’s resolutions include doing my part in keeping better track of our budget on a monthly basis, getting started on a system for housecleaning, getting two boxes of paperwork items filed or thrown and actually doing a baby book for Madeline. It’s more of a “big project” to do list, but we’ll see how it goes!

Happy New Year!