tonyandkirsten.org

A few pictures from this past month for your viewing enjoyment:

February Madeline Album
A couple of funny pictures from the Women’s Retreat

Well, after being intrigued by Scott, inspired by The Leopold’s, and challenged by Matt, I had to do my own.

So, here it is! The Hill family in Lego!

I was thinking about this for a while, but I didn’t have the guts to be the first Rock’er to do it. But I’ll be the second. I’ll jump on Matt’s bandwagon for free ipods.

Like Matt said, this is a legit thing. The idea is that each person does survey that takes a few minutes and needs to complete one “special offer.” Generally this is signing up for a service (or a credit card) that you could then cancel. The offer that I am participating in shouldn’t end up costing me anything if I cancel before the free trial ends. Then, you need to get five other people to also sign up on this website and complete a “special offer” in order to get the free ipod. So, I am one of Matt’s five people, and maybe someone out there reading this will be one of my five people. Of course, if you know Matt you might want to help him first…but if you don’t know him or you like me better (I mean…just kidding!)…you can help me out instead.

I know this sounds too good to be true, but the companies doing the “Special Offers” want to get customers so badly they pay sites like freeipods.com for referals. That’s basically how this works.

So, no pressure. I’m doing this partially just to help Matt, and partially because it would be cool to get a free ipod. If I never find my five people I won’t be too broken up about it. But, even if you don’t want the free ipod (or don’t want to go to the trouble of also finding five people to do this)…you can still help me or Matt out by completing the survey and special offer.

If you want to go for it…here’s my referal link so I get the credit: http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=15537519.

Have fun!

Today Madeline turned 9 months old. She was treated to a trip to the doctor’s office with only one shot! If you are trying to keep up with her latest stats, she now weighs a little over 19 pounds and is 27 inches long. She’s still about average (statistically speaking) in those areas, coming in right around the 50th percentile. Her head continues to be really small at 42 centimeters…which is a little less than the 10th percentile! Since most people seem to have kids with heads in those upper percentiles, I guess someone out there has to make up the stats on the lower end, and Madeline is just that lucky baby! She has four teeth now, and can stand unsupported for 5-10 seconds. She is more interested in crawling than walking at this point, but I am sure she will make some forrays in the direction of bipedal motion in the coming weeks.

In other random Monday news, I did our taxes today while Madeline took a very long afternoon nap (3hrs, she had skipped her morning nap all together). Yeah for getting lots of our money back from the government. Buying a house, plus having a baby plus making lots of tax-deductible charitible contributions, plus paying for some of Tony’s grad school expenses…equals very large returns from both the federal and state governments. I was almost feeling guilty about getting such large returns…but then I remembered it was our money to start with!!! We’re just getting it back after a short separation.

We knew we would be getting some money back, but the exact amount was a very pleasant surprise. We had already been planning to give some of this refund money away, and it was fun to then get to discuss how we might like to give more away. Our tax system is amazing in that the more you give, the more you can get back the next year (if you make enough to itemize). Give money away, get a bigger tax return, give some of that money away…rinse, lather, repeat the next year. And that’s not even touching the heavenly blessings of giving money away. Or the thrill of knowing that you might be a part of making something amazing happen…like a building for the Rock!

While cleaning/re-organizing a few things around the house yesterday, I ran across a small box containing letters, notes and a few other items from about 7 or 8 years ago. I had stuck the box in a place I thought was out of the way, but it turned out that space was better occupied by other things…and I needed to move the box out of the way. I’ve known this box was in the bottom of the sewing cabinet, but that was a great place to not think about it.

Having not looked at the contents for a couple of years at least, I decided to take a moment to do so. For some reason, I have left this box frozen in time, its contents representing only a little more than a year of my life when I was still in college. The items inside included number of encouraging notes, a couple of birthday cards and thank-you notes, a panel cut out from a Myrtle Beach Salt Water Taffy box, many letters from friends in other states (most of whom I don’t keep in touch with any more), a few pictures, some dried flowers and even a pin advertising the ”bucket ‘o fries.” at McDonald’s. In retrospect, I don’t know why I even kept many of these items.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the contents of that box. Amazement that I’ve already experienced a lot of the things I only dreamed about at that time in my life, like going on staff and seeing the Rock become what it is today. Wonder and awe that God is so good to me that He has given me a life beyond what I could have imagined at that time. Disappointment at relationships in which I didn’t keep my end of the deal and hence lost contact with amazing friends. Sadness thinking about friends I miss because they are now in other cities. Curiosity at what happened to acquaintances I haven’t seen in many years, some of whom I haven’t seen or heard from since that year.

Do you ever read things from your past and see yourself as you once were, almost as though you were looking at the life of someone else? I feel old and jaded in comparison to the idealistic, zealous, immature, young punk I was at that time in my life. I have few regrets over what has transpired since the events frozen in that box. Even when I think of the friends I have lost track of, I can see reasons why God might have wanted our lives to go in separate directions.

At that time in my life all I wanted to do was change the world. or at least change my little corner of the world at Iowa State. Now I’ve been here trying to do that for almost ten years. A few times I’ve really felt like I was, and most of the time it just felt like living life. Deep down, I know I will always be the kind of person who wants to change the world. But there are many days where I just get caught up in the mundane details of ministry and life, not really thinking about the bigger picture. I wonder what I’ll think if I hide this box for another few years? I hope I can hold on to being at least a little bit crazy and zealous even as I get really old.

If any of you are viewing this page right now, and thinking it looks a little odd, you’re probably using Internet Explorer. I’m sorry that the page doesn’t look right.

This last Wednesday, I upgraded the back end of this blog, WordPress to version 1.5. With the upgrade, the layout of the page did not carry over 100%, and I’ve observed some problems with IE. Note: This is not WordPress’s fault, I’m using a custom layout, and I’m not very good at designing for IE, yet. So, I’ll get it fixed, it’s just going to have to wait until I have some disposable time.

In the meantime, feel free to check out some other web browsing alternatives: Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, K-Meleon, or Camino, Safari .

Happy Valentines! You can celebrate the special day for free by sending virtual flowers or an e-card. If you would rather be known for your humor, be sure to stock up on valentines jokes before you go out for the day. Or if you desire to understand love to its fullest, you might want to read up on the science of love. Need to know who to love? The Love Calculator can surely help you out! Finally, if you are sick of this holiday all together, you can let your friends and/or enemies know by asking them to be your Anti-Valentine.

Oh, and don’t forget to have a happy Ferris Wheel Day too!

In the latter half of this week I was a walking advertisement for things you might NOT want to do when you are sick, at least not if you want to get better quickly. Things like getting less sleep than you normally do and working really hard on a project instead of taking it easy and giving your body a break. The result is that after having a cold for five days or so, I am just barely on the upward swing of feeling better.

But after a flurry activity for a little over 48 hours, Tony and I finished the Ezekiel Project proposals in time for the LTC meeting on Saturday. I wasn’t at the meeting, but apparently everyone liked them. I guess the bodily sacrifice of making myself more sick was probably worth it.

Madeline was sick this week too. I really was trying hard to not be one of those paranoid parents who brings their baby in to the see the doctor at the drop of a hat, but after getting advice from a more experienced mom and from a nurse at the clinic, I thought we should probably go ahead and make an appointment. Well, it turned out nothing more serious than a bad cold was ailing her…and the doctor’s comments made me feel kind of like I was one of those over-paranoid moms.

Several people whom I have told this story to have said something like, “At least you have peace of mind that nothing else was wrong.” The problem is, I wasn’t really that worried about her in the first place. Since I am the type of person who generally would have to be close to dying or at least severely uncomfortable before seeing a doctor (except when I was pregnant of course), I generally don’t get that worried about sickness in others either. With Madeline this time I was starting to wonder if I was being too much the unconcerned parent, and that she really had pneumonia or a serious ear infection or something and I was just ignoring it. I guess my sense of what is severe or not severe isn’t well tuned to childhood illness yet. Oh well, hopefully I will guess better next time!

In a similar vein to what I was reading about the Twixters, some observers think that the modern trend of parents protecting their children to the extreme is also delaying people’s entry into true adulthood and causing signficant distress in the lives of these young adults.

I read Albert Mohler’s blog somewhat regularly (He’s the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), and he wrote about this topic earlier this week. He references an article in Psycholgy Today from last fall that basically says more kids are breaking down in late adolesence or early adulthood (especially when they are away from home for the first time) because their parents have coddled them all their lives.

Mohler writes (quoting the Psychology Today article):

Whether we want to or not, we’re on our way to creating a nation of wimps,” Marano warns. She fast-forwards to college and university campuses, where “the fragility factor” is now most clearly evident. As she explains, “It’s where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses.”

This statement is easily verified by observing the reports issued by academic institutions. Psychological distress–sometimes evident in the mild form of anxiety and, in other cases, in binge drinking, self-mutilation, and even suicide–are now major concerns of college administrators.

I find Mohler’s commentary and the original article interesting both from the perspective of someone doing college ministry and from my perspective as a new parent. As a person involved with college ministry, it underscores the need for us as Christians to come along side students in distress and to both support them and to point them toward the Lord at a time when they support system they have relied upon in the past may not be there.

As a parent, it reminds me again of the necessity to allow Madeline to make mistakes and to not shield her from all the woes of life. While there is a limited need to do that now when she is still a baby, I can already see within me the motherly instinct that wants her not to have to ever suffer. She has been a little under the weather the past few days, and it pains me every time I hear her cough. I am sure it will feel much worse as I have to watch her fall down learning to ride a bike or help her learn the consequences of disobedience when she hits the “terrible twos.”

A verse that comes to mind is Hebrews 12:11: “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyfull, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the fruit of righteousness.”

I read the Google Blog last night and found out that the Google Image Search index has been updated for the first time in a long time. So what do I do? The vain thing everyone does, of course — search for myself and my loved ones.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a search for Kirsten Hill (no quotes) produces a picture of Tony and I from the rockisu.com staff page as the third result. A search for Anthony Hill (no quotes) produces a picture of Tony from the Cegso website as the eigth result. This is amazing to me because neither of us even crack the first page on a standard google search done in the same way. Madeline doesn’t fare so well though. A search for Madeline Hill (with or without the quotes) doesn’t produce a picture of her in the first few pages at all.

There’s the vain triva for the day, I guess! Do any of you rate better than 3rd in an image search for your name? (no quotes allowed!). Anyone have a high ranking on name-search-without-quotes on a regular Google search?