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A Weekend At The Movies

Ever since adding another person to the human population, I haven’t been able to watch as many movies as I used to. I’m sure this is mostly, and/or directly, related to the fact that it’s difficult to sit on a couch and watch something for 2 hours without being interrupted in some fashion by our offspring, but I think there have also been other distractions since moving to Iowa. Granted, the colder weather has limited our outdoor excursions, but last summer, we were outside more enjoying the weather or working in the garden (and that’s about to get started again in the next few months).  I’ve also been gaming quite a bit in the past year, more than I had been before.  I think a lot of that is also because it’s a lot easier to fit in 1 hour per day of gaming than it is to fit in half a movie, only to finish it the next day.

Therefore, I think I’m ready for a movie-filled weekend.  Less gaming, more movie-ing.  And with cold weather in store, I imagine that we’ll be parked downstairs in our pajamas for most of the weekend, anyway.  I’ve got a gaggle of DVDs that need some watching, as well as various flicks on Netflix Instant Queue that probably should have been watched long ago.  So here’s a list of the ones I’m considering, some of which I’ll make Brooke watch, too:

Of course, I guarantee that only half of those may actually get watched, but it’s still a worthwhile goal.  And more than likely, I’ll get Brooke on board with this idea and the movie selection will change dramatically.  I figure if I’m not making it to the movie theater as often as I used to, I may as well bring it to the comfort of my own home.  I think I’ve still got a free rental on Vudu through the PS3, so we’ll have a look at their selection as well.

Suggestions?  Apart from this list?  Especially easy-to-get Netflix ones.

Update: In case anyone was wondering what we (or just me…) ended up actually watching, here’s the list:

I’m satisfied with this weekend’s crop.  Should tide me over for awhile, at least.  🙂

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Hootie Was Right

Last Wednesday night, Meg went to bed as she normally does: takes a milk bottle (8 oz, usually), goes to sleep within 15-20 min, and we are out of the room within 30 min.  She woke up around 10:30 and had more milk, and had to be rocked to sleep again.  If I remember correctly, she woke up again in the 1:00 hour and had to be rocked to sleep yet again.

3:30 am rolls around, and she won’t go back down.  She will fall asleep, but we can’t lay her back in the crib without her waking up.  We finally bring her to bed with us, causing me to stay in bed and skip an hour of work.  Brooke, luckily, was on spring break, so she didn’t have to be at work at 7:30 am.

Meg really hadn’t slept through the night but for a handful of times since last November when she had strep.  Sometimes, she’d wake up once per night, sometimes two.  This past week or so, it had gone up to 3 or 4 times a night.  Wednesday night was the last straw.  3:30 am until 6:00 am is simply ridiculous when you have a one-year-old that doesn’t have an ear infection, and whose teeth aren’t causing that much pain: she’d been given Orajel and a few doses of Tylenol throughout the night.

Granted, Meg has battled various sicknesses and multiple ear infections, and the teething has been an issue more recently.  But to our knowledge, nothing was physically wrong with her now.  She was just escalating the times she’d wake up in the middle of the night, and simply would not go back to sleep on her own.

Brooke did some research, posted a plea for help on Facebook, and went to the library on Friday to see what books she could find.  She settled on “The Happiest Toddler On The Block,” by Harvey Karp.  Mostly, we used the book for the sleeping portion, although I’m sure Brooke will read the rest of it for other interesting tidbits.

Basically, there were a few possibilities outlined in the book to try with your kid, and I will briefly summarize them here:

  1. Immediately when your child starts crying, go into their room, pick them up, soothe them until they stop crying, and then put them down again in the crib.  If the start crying again, pick them up and do it again.  And again and again.  This can take 20-50 times when you first try it, though it will decrease each time you do it.
  2. Let your child cry for 3 minutes, then open their door, look to make sure they haven’t thrown up or injured themselves, then say “I love you, it is time for you to go to sleep, goodnight,” and then close the door again.  As they will undoubtably continue crying, go back in 5 minutes and do it again, then go back in 10 minutes and do it again, and finally go back every 15 minutes thereafter until they go to sleep, constantly reminding you that you’re there, even though they can’t see you. This method could take up to 5 nights, with the third night being the worst.  The crying could last an hour, easily, especially for the first few nights.

We chose the second option, as the first one never seemed to work in the past (or any portion of the method).

As we really didn’t want to risk a repeat of Wednesday night, we went ahead and decided to start Friday night.  We went out to dinner at the Starlight Room (very good!), and got ice cream at Dairy Queen.  We had a very pleasant Friday night, in preparation for what was to come…

Meg went down by 7:30 just as she normally does, and then she woke up around 10:30.  Brooke was already in bed, and as it was Friday night and I was staying up gaming anyway, I took the first shift.  I did exactly as the book prescribed, and used the stopwatch on my phone to make sure I went in at 3 min, 5 min, 10 min, etc.  Brooke stayed in bed and listened, just in case Meg started doing something unhealthy (aside from screaming at the tip-toppest of her lungs).  She also gave me a few pointers, as I wasn’t being “soothing enough” the first two times I poked my head in… 😛

It was around midnight when she finally stopped.  I think it was 11:45, the last time I actually went into the room, but I stayed up later to make sure she didn’t cry for the next 20-30 min.

She was likely tired out after that ordeal that she didn’t wake up again until around 4:00 am.  Brooke got up that time and went in, but she only had to once.  Meg fell asleep after Brooke went in and went through the routine.

Meg slept until 7:00 then.  Not bad for the first night!

The second night, Meg woke up multiple times, but never cried up until the 3 min line, so we never poked our heads in.  Never got up.  Not bad for the second night.

And last night?

Not a peep.

Not one, aside from a little coughing here and there.

Yes, on the third night, Meg slept from 7:00 pm until 7:00 am.  No crying.

Obviously, we’ll see how this translates into Night #4.  We’re off to a good start, certainly.  Because we have started this, we are also being more cognizant of giving her a sippy cup to use throughout the day, for both milk and apple juice.  It was good that we started this on a weekend so we could monitor how much she was drinking.  Yesterday, she had 4 sippy cups-worth of fluids, so she was certainly getting enough out of it.  Since she isn’t drinking as much (or at all) during the night, she transferred most of her fluids to the daytime.  So long as this continues while she’s at daycare, we should be good to go.

I’m sure we’ll still have some bad nights ahead of us, as the teething hasn’t stopped and she will surely get another ear infection or two, but at least now we have a plan and solid footing for a workable sleep schedule: for the whole family.

“Let Her Cry,” indeed.

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Chicks!

I’ve talked about raising chickens for eggs for quite awhile now. We finally have the room, facilities, and time for me to be able to start this enterprise, so I’m REALLY excited! My dad had a flock of chickens when I was a kid that finally met their demise to some rampant dogs when I was in middle school. I never really had much to do with the chickens, but we love to eat eggs and this seems like one more step to the self-sufficient lifestyle that I want to lead. If I can manage to keep these ladies alive and well, and we stay in the house for awhile longer, a couple of milking goats are the next step!

I bought 15 chicks from Orscheln’s Farm and Home in Iowa City on March 9. One of our cars was being serviced, so I had to go pick up Andy from work in Iowa City anyway, so it seemed like a good time to go ahead and pick out my chicks. The flock is 5 Rhode Island Reds, 5 California Whites, and 5 Barred Plymouth Rocks. I’m hoping to end up with 12 laying hens when they’re grown up.

I had my spring break last week, so my goal was to use the time off (and Meg was still going to day care since we had to pay for the week whether we used it or not) to modify an outbuilding into a hen house.  My construction skills are not great and I, apparently, get frustrated really easily, so Andy helped me to finish up on Saturday.  We still need to finish the nesting boxes, roost, and the outdoor run, but the space is usable for the flock to be enclosed in a ring while they get big enough that they won’t be able to escape through the holes in the foundation of the building.  Until their move outside, they were living in a box on our back porch, which made the cat and dog more than a little nervous!

This is the building that I hodgepodged into a hen house.  I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I tried to use mostly found wood, but I had to buy most of the wood for the door.  The building has a really cool weather vane on top and a concrete slab to the side, perfect for an outdoor run.  I hope to be able to let the hens “free range” in our yard in the afternoons this summer, but I’ll need to secure the garden first, so they don’t eat our veggies before we get what we need.

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03.20.11 Breakfast

We didn’t have to play at church this week, so we had time for a leisurely breakfast. Pancakes with granola, and strawberries that weren’t quite ripe, so I softened them up with a tablespoon of sugar and a drizzle of orange juice.

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Asplode!

Brooke and I were watching “House, M.D.” on Friday night in the office after Meg went to bed when we heard a loud “pop.” Not so much a “pop” as much as a “who’s shooting at us?!”

Well, turns out one of Brooke’s Hard Apple Cider bottles continued fermenting to the point where it generated enough CO2 to explode all over our dining room.  It sent glass flying across the room, including 8 ft in the air where it caught a nice, large shard in the curtains (pictured above).  We found small bits of glass spread throughout the room.

The Cider is now sitting outside in our metal trash can (sans trash, of course), where it will be a bit…safer…for everyone involved.  🙂

We had opened up some of the stuff last Wednesday night and I noted that it had lost some of the sweetness it had a few weeks ago, and the carbonation had increased.  The champagne yeast, apparently, is more hearty than we’d initially thought.  That, or the brown sugar Brooke added to “prime” the cider for bottling ended up being more than was necessary.

Either way, if you have a bottle of our cider sitting in your fridge, I’d recommend you open it and drink it immediately.  And do it over a sink.  It can get messy. 🙂

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03.17.11 St. Patty’s Dinner

For the past 5 years, we’ve attended Dr. Westfall’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration in St. Louis, with dancers, food, and lots of beer. Since we’re not there any more, I decided to make an Irish-ish dinner to celebrate the “holiday.” Corned beef, roasted potatoes with carrots and onions, cabbage, and soda bread. And Smithwick’s beer. We had mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert-while not exactly Irish, it is super green!

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Lonely In The Middle

The last few weeks have presented a variety of issues within the American national discourse that warrant commentary, but I’ll let that aside right now and focus on something a bit more “meta” to the situation: how, exactly, we as members of society communicate with each other.

A few weeks ago, I posted on Facebook on two unrelated subjects.  On the first, I stated the following:

Andy Linsenbardt wants help with a list of bands or groups worse than Coldplay. The only one I can come up with so far is LFO.

That status update started a discussion spanning 96 comments across 10 or so people.  I followed it up with this:

For those that don’t want to read through the 89 comments in my previous status posting, the following was decided, after much deliberation: ICP < Nickelback < Creed < Coldplay.

On the other side of the coin, for a completely separate issue, I posted a story published by the Des Moines Register regarding abortion laws in Nebraska and how a particular couple were forced to do something they didn’t want to.  The feed this post spawned went for 51 comments across 7 or 8 people.

In both of these unrelated discussions, involving many individuals of completely different ideologies, we were able to “hold it together” and not get (too) personal.  We were completely capable of providing opinions without the need to tell each other that we were bad people or completely wrong (well, aside from the occasional sarcastic comment in that first thread…).  For the most part, it was a respectful discussion from ranging viewpoints.  On the latter discussion, I don’t think we came to anything close to a consensus, yet I feel we left more informed on the opposing viewpoints.

While the first status update was largely a “dig” at Coldplay (much-deserved…), I wasn’t thinking that I’d get nearly that many comments.

On the latter one, I kinda did, which brings me to the following point:

I think the thing missing most from the national discourse today is honesty and openness, especially from those positioned in The Middle.  There are quite a few folks out there on the political ultra-right or ultra-left that have their signs waving on the picket line, the so-called “activists” you could say.  These people are being very successful in pulling their ranks further and further from each other, making it appear that there is only a very distant “middle-ground” left between them.

It’s just sad when Facebook is the last bastion of reasonable discourse.

I won’t get into the abortion debate here or anything, but it’s safe to say that, aside from the folks out there with “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life” signs going on marches, the issue is frequently ignored in the middle.  I think it’s mostly out of fear, as those in the middle are afraid of being labeled one or the other, and what that may mean.  It’s the kind of issue we frequently ignore in schools.  Going to Lutheran and Methodist churches all my life, it’s an issue that’s frequently ignored there, as well.  It just seems as if there isn’t really a middle ground in that particular debate, let alone a variety of others.  People are afraid of the subject.  They keep it locked away.

In a related fashion, all too often, I hear of people not wanting to say anything about politics, or about religion, or about culture, because they are afraid of offending friends of theirs, or of “getting into it” to the point where they may not end up speaking with someone for a few days (or weeks…or ever again…).  These are people that don’t want to bring it up around the dinner table with their spouse, or with other family members.  Those that don’t want to bring it up at work so they don’t end up getting into some kind of long argument with their co-workers.  And most relevant to this particular post, those that don’t want to post anything on Facebook or other social networking sites so their friends (or future employers…) can’t see what they think about various issues.

And therein lies the problem.  If people aren’t willing to defend their positions, with intelligence and respect, then those on the ultra-left and those on the ultra-right with their signs will have effectively won.  They will have won by scaring those in the middle away from getting into the debate in the first place.  By causing them to hide from the discussion, keeping the issue from ever reaching any kind of moderate consensus.  Without a voice firmly planted in The Middle, then the opposing sides continue to pull apart with little to hold them together.

The problem is nothing new, and it exists in other instances.  Case in point: Years ago, at a Wesley House float trip, I had a great conversation with a Methodist pastor I greatly respect.  We were lamenting the decreasing population of Methodist campus ministries, while others were increasing in number.  In his view, the other ministries were offering a more “black and white” interpretation of the world, and the Bible, while Methodists (and ELCA, and others…) were allowing for the fact that there are “greys:” that black and white weren’t the only options.  The people we were trying to provide a service for weren’t interested in The Middle: they chose their extremes, likely because they wanted to be told what to think  The Middle, to them, was a scary place to be, a place where you may have to question things, have to think about the world, and have to make decisions.  Picking an extreme, there’s a clear-cut answer: you accept it and move on.

On a political spectrum, I technically fall center-left.  I’m a Moderate, by most interpretations.  But my thoughts on a variety of subjects, to some, would paint me as an ultra-leftist (because “The Middle” has been pulled more and more toward the Conservative side of the spectrum, but that’s another issue altogether…).

You can position yourself in the middle of an argument and still have strong feelings about it.  It’s possible.  And I try to do it all the time.

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03.16.11 Dinner

I used the other half of the pizza dough from our breakfast pizza the other day to make a more traditional pie. Italian sausage, green peppers, and red onions. Andy accidentally bought a package of Italian sausages the last time he went to Aldi, but I really like using them. I can just pull out one link, defrost it in a bowl of warm water, then cut the meat out of the casing for things like pasta sauce or this pizza. I hate to tell Andy he’s right, but his mistake actually helps!

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03.15.11 Dinner

After a long day of chicken coop building, this country-ish dinner hit the spot! Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and milk gravy, and homegrown green beans. Even Meg got to try a little of everything!

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Accepting Religious Curiosity in Context

I was catching up on NPR’s “On Point” from February 16th, where Tom Ashbrook was interviewing Richard Watts, author of various books, the most recent of which is “Hungers of the Heart: Spirituality and Religion for the 21st Century.” The entire podcast is worth listening to, but toward the end, Watts and Ashbrook got into some interesting territory.  In general, Watts is very interested in “the historical Jesus,” looking at the man and historical record and the context in which the Bible was written, as opposed to focusing on what could be considered the more “mystical” aspects of the Bible.  We pick up this transcript as Tom Ashbrook is reading a comment off the internet:

Ashbrook: “…but then here’s Elmridge who says of you ‘but he is denying the divinity of Jesus.’  What about that, Rev. Watts?”

Watts: “Well, one of the things we need to do is we always need to read texts in context.  When we don’t do that we get into big trouble.  Now, for example, if I tell you that there’s…that I know someone in the first century that’s called ‘divine,’ ‘the son of god,’ and ‘the savior,’ you know, who do you suppose I’m talking about?  Well, most people would say you’re talking about Jesus.  No, I’m talking about Caesar Augustus.  Caesar Augustus received all of those divine titles, and so when Christians talked about Jesus and what they had encountered in his life, they used titles which were very counter-cultural, they were saying, look, if you want to know what life is about, if you want to know what real power is, if you want to know where divinity is, look at this peasant going around talking about creating a new community of compassion and love.  Don’t look for the seat of power for the emperor in Rome.”

…

Watts: “Christianity in the very beginning, before it was called ‘Christianity,’ Tom [Ashbrook], it was called ‘The Way.’  And it was a way of life.  It was a lifestyle.  It doesn’t mean that lifestyle was devoid of a basis of belief, of course it was, but it was a lifestyle long before it was a creed, and I think we need to get over our hang-up with absolute creeds and get back to the lifestyle, a lifestyle which is non-violent, which is compassionate, which is inclusive, which creates community rather than holding people off at arm’s length.”

There was another interesting exchange later in the podcast.

Ashbrook: “You know very well, as do many other preachers, that the kind of mainline protestant churches that you’re describing that may be most open to this kind of open-minded, liberal conversation, are the ones that have seen their attendance just go through the floor in the last decade.  Now why is that?”

Watts: “Part of that, that’s a great question, and part of the problem is, that, I have to lay at the feet of clergy.  It seems to me that an awful lot of clergy don’t bother to teach the people what they themselves have learned.  And so, people are sort of fundamentalist by default because they, these sorts of questions that you and I are talking about today are not often raised and I know that in mainline churches there are all kinds of people sitting there never receiving permission to raise their questions, never having the opportunity to engage in give-and-take about what their life experience has taught them, or what their life experience has asked them.

Let me tell you a very brief story.  There was a scholar in the Jesus Seminar, which works to uncover the facts about the historical Jesus, that was giving a talk to a group of Missouri Synod Lutherans, a very conservative denomination, and he was talking about New Testament documents, and the document “Q,” which is a lost document of the sayings of Jesus.  And then came time for the question period and he wondered, he felt like Daniel in the lion’s den, and a woman stood up and, instead of addressing the speaker, she turned around to address her preacher in the pew behind her and she said to him, ‘did you know about Q?’ And he said, ‘well, yeah.’  And she said, ‘why didn’t you tell us?’  And I think that’s a very powerful parable, that our churches are full of people that are questioning, who are curious, but who aren’t being adequately taught…”

I won’t write much about this, as the post is already long enough with these transcripts included.  I just wanted to say that this is the kind of thing I like to hear about, the historical context in which the Bible was written, and how that context can help inform what we know and what we don’t know about religion.  Moreover, I think that if there was more of this being taught in our churches today, there would be fewer “black and white” interpretations of what the Bible tells us, and we would all be more accepting of each other.

It’s a shame when pastors and educators shut down the intellectually curious.  We should all be fostering curiosity in ourselves and in our kids in order to better understand where we come from and who we are, rather than asking someone to tell us, and then accepting that information blindly.

Questioning and thoughtful investigation is the way of science.  It should be the way of religion, too.