My Latest to Brother Harkin...

The logical result of your statist desire to usurp healthcare control is the desire to enforce a code of health on the ruled that infringes upon their liberty.

Although I am disgusted that you are proud to be leading this charge, because there are far more legitimate isues for the government to be concerned with, I am also amused that you can honestly claim that such minor actions will accomplish your intended result. You can build all the bike paths you want (I do enjoy them myself) and open an all-day fruit bar in the government schools, and if no one chooses to make use of them nothing will happen.

Our very lives are in peril so the government action must be greater. Trample on liberties for our own good. We need you to help us whether we know it or not. Please illegalize fast-food and beer immediately. Please establish a government commission to enforce a grocery fairness doctrine where health foods must get equal shelf placement and advertisement as potato chips and Coke. Maybe selling groceries on the open market is a bad idea and we all need equal rations to ensure equal access to a healthy lifestyle. After all health is a right and liberty is a bell.

Ok, so enough funny stuff. Let's get serious and propose something that would actually positively affect the health of the most unhealthy people in our society - the poor. You provide them with government food stamps and they are able to squander them on Coke and Doritos. A simple change to food stamps that enforced they be spent on fruit, vegetables, meat, and bread would be lawful, ethical, free, reasonable, and likely would produce a far greater result than bike paths and school programs.

Someday I hope we will wake up and realize that the government has no place in schooling children, healthcare, agriculture, automaking, or Wall Street and you guys can get back to protecting life, liberty, and our pursuit of happiness.

Hanging out at Grandma Smith's

I thought it would be fun to lose a chunk of the Mazda's front bumper this weekend, so I drove to Manchester hoping that some ice would come off a truck's mudflap and take care of that for me....

The annual pilgrimage to JCPenny

Isaiah's vocabulary

Isaiah has really been starting to converse with us lately. He is saying polysyllabic words and speaking in small sentences. He likes to talk about basketball and spiderman (biterman). He pretends to read books and now tells us "I'm poopy." We probably hear "I want a drink" most of all, though. I took him to a high school football game this weekend and he spent the whole game calling them Hawkeyes. We have him indoctrinated well.... 

Gabe and Asher in need of a trim....

Isaiah looks a bit like his cousin Seth

The Boys

It is Fall...

It has been awhile - things have been nusy as usual. I'll just give an update I guess.

Gabriel has begun his fall activities - school, AWANA club, and soccer. He has had two soccer practices and so far seems good at the kicking part, but not so good at the paying attention part. If we can get him to listen to the coach I think he'll play well enough for his first year. He loves AWANA and is memorizing his Bible verses quickly as usual. His schooling is going well since he loves to read - his real challenge is writing and we are improving on that with some effort.

Asher is going to AWANA this year as well and likes it a lot. He plays well and wishes he could be in soccer too. He is tortured watching it without being able to participate. He is learning a lot by listening to Elizabeth read books to him and Gabe. They are reading the Boxcar Children now and have been reading about animals as well.

Isaiah has had allergies pretty bad for weeks now. He isn't letting it slow him down too much, though. He runs around saying any word he wants and dancing all the time. He jumps on and off of furniture to imitate Olympic diving, which he got a big kick out of. He is trouble and entertainment, sometimes simultaneously.

Elizabeth is into her Fall season selling CAbi clothes and has been trying to keep up with everything. She has been enjoying Hawkeye football season with me.

I am trying to finish some home projects before cold weather. I added to those projects by buying an old car that needs some work. My Rodeo is getting pretty ugly so it is now the beater truck for going to Menards and the dump. Once I have a couple things fixed I'll be driving a Porsche 944. It looks pretty good for being old and just needs a little TLC.

I guess we're way behind on posting pics and we just got some so let me crank up the scanner (we're old school) and put some up!

Traded Wheels

We sold our van in the paper and yesterday we drove to North Aurora, IL to pick up a Mazda 5. Not a lot of people are familiar with them yet, but they are a basically a little Mazda car stretched into a compact minivan. It has three rows of two seats each. It drives with a very sporty feel compared to our old van. It also gets a lot better fuel economy. I pulled some pics from their ads.

My Latest Sermon

I preached on Psalm 110 a few weeks ago and it can be found on www.cornerstone-marion.org. This was my third attempt at filling in for Pastor Chris when he is away. It is a lot more work than I had guessed to prepare for that.

The Pool

We got a pass this year for Cedar Rapids pools. It has been a lot of fun for the kids. We have typically gone to either Lake McBride or Palo every week or two in past years but are now ready for more frequent and shorter trips.

Gabe and Asher are both at about the same swimming level, which is that they really don't yet. They dunk and jump and splash around, but so far no more. Hopefully going there a lot more will help, as well as seeing other kids they want to play with in the deeper water. Isaiah loves to run around right in the entry of the zero-depth part. He will only go about a foot deep before turning around, but he has a blast and can be allowed to play there while also keeping track of the other two easily.

Cedar Rapids has five or six pools and two of them are great. The one in our neighborhood is small, but fairly pleasant. The two gripes I have are the rules and the closures of the deep end. Never before in my life have I heard of a pool closing the deep end for "cloudiness." Apparently after a few hours of laborious exertion the lifeguards (ave age of 13?) get to decide that "cloudiness" prohibits them from manning that extra position and they shorten their rotations. The only part of the pool that is enjoyable for anyone over 8 is off-limits. I looked into that cloudy abyss and saw the bottom vividly. If someone had dropped a coin I could've told them heads or tails.

Think about the unmanageable complexity of watching one person at a time jump into the water and then making sure they reach the ladder about 30 seconds later. It's unfathomable that we don't have an intellect test for hiring that position.

Someday my grandkids will hear my stories of diving boards and backflips and say "yeah, but that was back in the dark ages..." That's unfortunate.

Spiritual gifts?

So we were driving through Dubuque last week and passed a Psychic shop. They had their flooded carpet rolled up out on the curb. Hmmm......

Lego Star Wars

Gabriel was introduced to the Lego Star Wars video game at my friend Josh's house. I have resisted purchasing a video game system so far, but I have upgraded our PC with a nice graphics card and monitor. I went online and quickly found a free demo of the game for PC with enough characters and levels to keep a 6yr old busy for awhile.

It has been fun to watch him learn to play the game. I'm no fan of obsessive gaming, but I do think that some casual playing develops certain skills in a person. Human-machine interaction is a constant fact of life today and it helps to develop a knack for it.

I find it interesting that we can work with Gabriel for hours to teach him something he is not interested in with little success. However, dangle a video game on the carrot stick and he will suddenly be able to type long addresses into Internet Explorer, navigate the Windows menu, etc. Ask him to clean up before he can play and the den will be free of toys in seconds rather than the typical hour and a half.

Family Vacation While Dad Works

Elizabeth went with the kids and her mom to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Marshall, TX. They live on a big plot of land and have animals. There are ten kids in the family so there is a lot going on down there all the time. The boys are shooting guns and enjoying some nice weather. They drove down and are making a little over week of it.

I am working on the main bathroom with my friend Josh I grew up with in Manchester. He is very good at hanging and finishing sheetrock as well as trim carperntry. Those happen to be the two parts of the job I am weak on so it working out well. Today (in a mere 16 hours) we replaced the subfloor, framed in and hung the window, and sheetrocked the ceiling and two walls. It is coming together nicely. In a week the sheetrock should be finished and I'll start laying the tile floor.

Isaiah walks

It has been awhile since I've posted and in that time Isaiah has really become a good walker. He walks all around the house now. He keeps his hands out and takes his time near obstacles, but he doesn't fall often anymore. He loves to dance and play pots and pans as musical instruments while walking. He is getting into everything and getting a mischievous grin. He mostly says no and stop it. He has started answering a sweet little yes to many questions, though. Like his brothers he already has an affection for speaking words clearly and precisely. We don't try to make them speak properly - they insist upon it. Elizabeth and I can say "yeah" 400 times a day and our kids still prefer "yes." Whatever. I just know I'm going to have three little smarties correcting my conversational English in a few years and it's going to be annoying....

Our little visitor

Last night Elizabeth came home from a walk in the dark and found a little friend was visiting our porch swing. She wasn't exactly happy to see him at the time. He was just eating a stick of butter he found in our garbage. Later we had a flashlight on him while banging on our door and he didn't budge. To keep him from making a big mess on the porch I decided to get him to move on down the road by shooting his butt with my BB gun. It is an old spring-powered gun so it doesn't even break skin - just stings pretty good. Well, I shot him and he fell over as though dead instantly. Puzzled by this, I was trying to figure out what had happened when the most obvious thing in the world came to me. Opossums play dead! He wasn't going to scamper away like I'd been hoping - he was going to lay there for hours now! An hour later he was still laying there. Finally, later that night he took off without making a mess on the porch. Hopefully they have good memories....