Golden's brother got married last weekend. It was quite an involved event, actually, as there were seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen as well as five ushers. That is a lot of people, and was indicative of the effort put into the wedding. The ceremony was only twenty minutes long, however, which is the perfect length as far as I am concerned.
There is so much that I do not understand about weddings. I know that most girls grow up planning every minute detail of their wedding for fun, and I know that the appeal of a wedding is supposed to be that this is a ceremony that focuses on the bride and makes her feel special. I, in my male mind, do not understand much more than this about weddings, though. I think this is epitomized in the fact that every chick flick seems to involve a wedding at some point and every time a wedding shows up in an action movie it is because a character somehow ruins the wedding event by being chased through the area where the ceremony is being held.
Something that I noted on Facebook was that I am very thankful that my parents agreed to fly here to help take care of the kids while everything was going on. There are a lot of things that people involved with a wedding are supposed to do and dealing with two kids under the age of three while doing them would be a monumental if not impossible task. Add to this that no almost-three-year-old boy does not want to sit around a church in a tux for hours on end doing nothing.
Golden's brother went to Greece for his honeymoon and I have to say that it sounds like a great place to visit. I'm interested in hearing how it went. Since we did not officially have jobs at the time and had to pay for most everything with plastic or cash from family when we were married, our honeymoon was to St. Louis rather than somewhere more exotic. It was a much nicer vacation than it sounds, far better than any vacation we have taken since, but I feel that we need to make up for the apparent lameness of our honeymoon destination next year on our tenth anniversary if possible.
So, that's pretty much it on weddings. That is, until the next one I attend.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
two is different than one
When we decided to have NJ I was pretty intimidated about the whole thing. Since I have never been a kid person I had many questions as to whether I had the stuff to be a father. When we decided to have CD I had gotten past most of those concerns. We had our challenges with NJ, but very little of the problems were challenges that I felt incapable of handling. CD couldn't be too much different.
While both kids have their similarities, it is amazing how different the challenges are that we are facing with CD compared to what we saw with NJ. She has far different sleeping patterns, has different eating patterns, and even seems to move around differently than NJ (she hasn't really attempted to crawl yet because she can get across the room easier by rolling).
The sleeping habits are the ones that are causing the most effort for Golden right now, so that is what we are working on. Tonight is the first night of using the Ferber method to get CD to sleep. This means that we will probably be hearing some crying over the next few nights. If it means less effort in getting CD to sleep going forward, though, putting up with a little crying is worth it.
At least we can console ourselves that CD will be easier to potty train than NJ. Right?
While both kids have their similarities, it is amazing how different the challenges are that we are facing with CD compared to what we saw with NJ. She has far different sleeping patterns, has different eating patterns, and even seems to move around differently than NJ (she hasn't really attempted to crawl yet because she can get across the room easier by rolling).
The sleeping habits are the ones that are causing the most effort for Golden right now, so that is what we are working on. Tonight is the first night of using the Ferber method to get CD to sleep. This means that we will probably be hearing some crying over the next few nights. If it means less effort in getting CD to sleep going forward, though, putting up with a little crying is worth it.
At least we can console ourselves that CD will be easier to potty train than NJ. Right?
Monday, June 08, 2009
self-diagnosis
I have mentioned on several occasions that I am OCD. Golden and I even joke that together we complete most of the OCD symptoms. It turns out that neither of these is completely true. While I have some mild quirks, such as preferring things in fours and preferring to not step on cracks in the sidewalk, those quirks do not come anywhere near causing me the disability that true OCD would cause. My mild tendencies do not really mess with my actual life on any level deeper than determining the number of chips I will pull out of a bag.
I think that I am like a lot of people, or at least a lot of Americans, in that I figure that everything that seems different from the norm about me must be a condition of some sort. I sometimes misread things so I have questioned whether I have dyslexia. I cannot go to sleep many nights, so that must be some sort of medically-caused insomnia. At one point I figured I had a good chance of having COPD because I was easily winded.
The truth of the matter is that I would guess that most people have little quirks that, if they analyzed them, would appear to point to some medical condition. I just happen to be the type of person to analyze my quirks. I wonder what condition could cause me to be that type of person?
I think that I am like a lot of people, or at least a lot of Americans, in that I figure that everything that seems different from the norm about me must be a condition of some sort. I sometimes misread things so I have questioned whether I have dyslexia. I cannot go to sleep many nights, so that must be some sort of medically-caused insomnia. At one point I figured I had a good chance of having COPD because I was easily winded.
The truth of the matter is that I would guess that most people have little quirks that, if they analyzed them, would appear to point to some medical condition. I just happen to be the type of person to analyze my quirks. I wonder what condition could cause me to be that type of person?
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
anthropomorphic fun
I am sure that I am not the only one who has noticed that the ratio of adults to kids in a movie theater is inversely proportional to the ratio of animals to humans in the movie. In short, saying that kids movies have a lot of animals in them would be an understatement. I have to wonder why this is.
While I did have a few pets when I was a kid I have never been an animal person. I don't mind pets but I simply don't establish relationships with animals, which I think is an important prerequisite to being an animal person. I still liked a lot of kids movies with animals in them when I was a kid (and some while I am an adult), but the fact that a movie has animals in it has never made a movie more appealing at any age. I would have been just as entertained if Fievel from An American Tail were a human, though it would have made the movie title a bit less descriptively accurate. It's the same with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and all of the rest of the incredibly well-known anthropomorphic fictional characters I watched in my childhood.
Why is it that movies for kids focus on animals so much comparatively to movies for adults? Is it because kids spend more time around the family pet than adults do? Is it because a story with talking animals lends itself to being more fantastical, which is more appealing to kids? Is it because kids are more likely to have empathy for animals than adults are? My theory is that it is a combination of the things that I just mentioned, plus the fact that this is just the way it has always been done so this is the way we're going to continue to make kids movies.
While I did have a few pets when I was a kid I have never been an animal person. I don't mind pets but I simply don't establish relationships with animals, which I think is an important prerequisite to being an animal person. I still liked a lot of kids movies with animals in them when I was a kid (and some while I am an adult), but the fact that a movie has animals in it has never made a movie more appealing at any age. I would have been just as entertained if Fievel from An American Tail were a human, though it would have made the movie title a bit less descriptively accurate. It's the same with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and all of the rest of the incredibly well-known anthropomorphic fictional characters I watched in my childhood.
Why is it that movies for kids focus on animals so much comparatively to movies for adults? Is it because kids spend more time around the family pet than adults do? Is it because a story with talking animals lends itself to being more fantastical, which is more appealing to kids? Is it because kids are more likely to have empathy for animals than adults are? My theory is that it is a combination of the things that I just mentioned, plus the fact that this is just the way it has always been done so this is the way we're going to continue to make kids movies.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
writer's block
I have not been posting lately because I have been kind of working on an article for a magazine produced at my church. I say kind of working because all that I have really been doing is fighting writer's block. This typically happens to me when I do not have a precise set of parameters in my mind as far as what the final result should really look like.
This past semester I poured hours and hours of work into a paper for one of my classes, far more than I should have, because I was not convinced that I was following the construct that the professor wanted. In that class everyone got to see everyone else's paper, so when I looked through everyone else's work I noticed that I had written more than one thousand words more than the next largest paper, and I did not accomplish that by filling the paper with fluff. There was no maximum page limit on the papers and so I overcompensated to be sure I was doing the right thing. Looking through some of the other papers, it appears that most other people had a different approach.
With this article I am not completely certain how casual or spiritual it is supposed to be. My natural inclination is to type a step-by-step lesson, but that does not feel exactly right for this magazine. At the very least, this is not something that I expect to be obsessing about too much longer. My article is due on the third, and I think I have actually settled on a topic. Finally.
This past semester I poured hours and hours of work into a paper for one of my classes, far more than I should have, because I was not convinced that I was following the construct that the professor wanted. In that class everyone got to see everyone else's paper, so when I looked through everyone else's work I noticed that I had written more than one thousand words more than the next largest paper, and I did not accomplish that by filling the paper with fluff. There was no maximum page limit on the papers and so I overcompensated to be sure I was doing the right thing. Looking through some of the other papers, it appears that most other people had a different approach.
With this article I am not completely certain how casual or spiritual it is supposed to be. My natural inclination is to type a step-by-step lesson, but that does not feel exactly right for this magazine. At the very least, this is not something that I expect to be obsessing about too much longer. My article is due on the third, and I think I have actually settled on a topic. Finally.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
typhoid baby
This weekend we are getting a good reminder of the value of taking steps to not spread germs. Golden and NJ both caught colds last week from an event that we went to and those have spread to CD and me. I have long believed that a cold was one of the worst things I can catch because I don't really get sick enough to skip things but I do get sick enough to be moderately miserable. The past few days this has been aggravated by NJ having a hard time getting to and staying asleep at night, and now CD going through the same thing.
I think everyone with kids has several stories about the impact of illnesses. It always seems to be a real gamble to take either of the kids anywhere because a significant percentage of the time the kids are in a situation where there might be germs (church nursery, carts at a store, restaurant booster seat, etc) they catch something that works through the family for the next two weeks. This is compounded by the fact that different people have different standards for how sick they or their kids have to be before they don't go to church, or the store, or a restaurant.
So, if we tend to skip a lot of things it is not because we are avoiding everyone. It's because we are trying to avoid everyone's germs.
I think everyone with kids has several stories about the impact of illnesses. It always seems to be a real gamble to take either of the kids anywhere because a significant percentage of the time the kids are in a situation where there might be germs (church nursery, carts at a store, restaurant booster seat, etc) they catch something that works through the family for the next two weeks. This is compounded by the fact that different people have different standards for how sick they or their kids have to be before they don't go to church, or the store, or a restaurant.
So, if we tend to skip a lot of things it is not because we are avoiding everyone. It's because we are trying to avoid everyone's germs.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
past performance
As part of the process of setting up my laptop I have reorganized many of the documents on our main computer so that I can properly copy what I need onto the laptop. While I was going through the documents I came across some folders containing homework and various papers that I wrote for some of my undergrad courses. Looking back on that work now, it is amazing to me how much time I spent on such a small amount of work and how mediocre my writing was.
I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.
The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?
I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.
The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?
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