Most of you know my rant: 😦 Husband’s cancer diagnosis.
🙂 It is one of the better ones to have, however. We know God lets nothing touch us that is not for His glory and our good. We have prayer warriors. We have health care available.
🙂 Our out of state daughter, son and SIL are on their way here as I type. They will visit her sisters on the way here or back. I am so glad my children keep in touch and make the effort to see one another when possible. I am grateful for good parents for my grandchildren.
🙂 In the midst of a one-week break from 2nd shift childsitting. Still have some after-school childsitting, and took care of him for a couple hours this morning before his dad picked him up, as his mom is at “Boy Scout University”. That is a one-day event with a variety of classes to take, and she’ll get a badge or something to go on her uniform.
🙂 (: Flyboy, out 21-year-old son, was out for the evening last night. Around 9:30 he called and said to Mrs. B: “The first thing you need to know is that I’m all right.”
On his way home, less than a mile away, he had been rear-ended waiting to make a left turn. The road is one lane each way, but widens to the right at the intersection to let through traffic get by. The other driver must not have been paying attention and didn’t see him in time to go around. Both drivers were fine but there were pieces of both cars all over the place.
While Flyboy was still in the car, he saw a young man jogging away from the scene with a dog. He didn’t realize at the time that the jogger was the other driver. He got out and walked back to the other car only to find nobody in it.
By the time we got there a fire rescue team and police had arrived. A good Samaritan was also there, having stopped to direct traffic around the cars and debris until the police got there. Our car was driveable enough that Flyboy had pulled it off to the side. One back corner of the car was bashed in and the car was not safe to drive anywhere. I think the other car also wasn’t driveable.
After a little while the jogger came back without the dog and identified himself as the driver of the other car. The police immediately cuffed him, I guess because he had left the scene. I heard a little of their conversation. He was worried about his dog. He didn’t sound fully coherent – he said something about having been rear-ended, which made no sense. Maybe he was just rattled. The police took him across the street to assess him. We’re not sure what happened to him after that.
🙂 Flyboy is fine, got home in time to finish a school assignment that was due at midnight (online), and went to work this morning.
🙂 He was calm throughout, and conducted himself appropriately with the rescue crew and police.
🙂 We are short one car and probably will have to replace it – I expect insurance to call it totalled.
So glad he is ok, other driver too (though sounds like he could have bought himself a bit of trouble in this).
🙂 Made it through the 2nd week at our new office. We found much more comfortable chairs which helps, but the atmosphere remains pretty inappropriate. Most of my co-workers think the executive with our company who picked out these spots needs to come work in one of them for 8 hours.
🙂 I’m pretty sure it will work out eventually to split my time somewhat with working from home on some days. There’s a morning meeting near my house I’ll be covering Wednesday so I’ll probably ask to spend that day working from home.
🙂 For a year I’ve wanted to do a project type story on homeowners who decide to restore their old homes with original materials, etc. — to preserve rather than remodel. But when our new editor came in, she was unimpressed with the idea so I pretty much dropped it. But she’s off on medical leave for about a month and her assistant who’s filling in, a young reporter/editor who’s rising fast (and is a very good writer) loves the idea when I pitched it to him this week. So I’m going to get back to it.
I hope to focus on a woman who bought a 2-story Queen Ann Victorian near the harbor about a year ago — Real Estate Guy had let me peek inside when it was about to go up for auction and it was in pretty bad shape, everyone hoped someone would get it to restore and not to tear down or ruin with a cheap remodel effort. She’s doing a full restoration and is even posting a blog and has a FB page “Victorian by the Bay” which makes it a natural for a story. Problem is, she says it’s too “messy” right now for a story — I keep trying to tell her the “mess” is a big part of what I want to showcase. 🙂 I’ll keep working on her. She seems very nice and also is new to our area.
😦 Two men in their 20s were shot and killed on one of our streets the other night (close to the waterfront, about a mile below where I live). One was shot in the head, the other shot multiple times. Sounds gang-related (and that’s the area where gangs are still prevalent). That means probably more shootings to come as each side retaliates.
🙂 Baby S is here and sleeping. That’s plenty of praise for this afternoon. 🙂
It took an hour to get her to sleep–she was mad that a stranger was holding her and not her mommy. But I talked to her, sang to her, and otherwise just loved her for a while. Her calm periods grew longer and longer, and finally her crying wasn’t angry crying but self-soothing, and she dropped off on a blanket on the floor. (She was arching her back and screaming whenever I put it in her bouncy chair, so I laid a blanket on the floor instead and that worked.) She’s a bit over seven months, has two teeth, is beginning to be mobile, and it isn’t a good “phase” to be left for several hours with people she hasn’t seen since Christmas. But I’m good at getting babies to sleep (usually quicker than that), but never succeed in having them stay asleep once I put them down, so having a babe who has been asleep more than an hour is good. She has a reputation for being a happy baby, so hopefully feeding her and playing with her will go better than that first hour!
Her parents liked the condo and what we have done to it, being particularly complimentary about our “special areas” (my husband’s studio / guest room, my office / craft area). By the time they get home, I imagine all of us will be about ready to call it a night. But they’ll go with us to church tomorrow (which all of us are looking forward to) and then eat lunch with us–my husband is making burgers, so we’ll have some time to visit tomorrow.
Cheryl, I saw that as an advantage in Becky’s method. She took hers to church, They stayed in the nursery, but also, all of the women wanted to hold her baby. And she let them. The baby didn’t care who held them as long as somebody did. I was amused that at the end of the service, Becky had to collect her children before leaving.
They all turned out well.
The youngest turns eight today.
Sometime in the last couple or more decades, it has become popular to keep a baby in one of those baby carriers. I would see babies in church in a carrier rather than being held. I always held my babies and toddlers (when the toddlers wanted or needed to be held), and couldn’t understand why some would give up that closeness for the carriers.
Also, from a strictly practical perspective, those carriers look awkward to carry, especially as the babies get heavier. The parent needs to hold the carrier out from their body a bit to avoid getting hit with it.
Not to say that there aren’t times they could come in handy.
Yes, I think the carriers are awful. I mean the carseats that have a handle and they just pick them up. What is wonderful are the cloth carriers, like the ergo, that hold the baby nestled up to mommy. Right where the baby needs to be. I had the privilege of giving one to my youngest.
😀 I got to keep my grandson Rob for 4 hours this afternoon while his parents attended training for Children’s Sunday School workers at our church. My wife is getting over an illness and was afraid she might be contagious, so I had Rob, Arnold Weaver and Arnold’s sister Sally by myself.
Rob will be 9 months old this week. He has been running at high speeds in his walker for a while, but has only just learned to crawl. Now he can get into everything. He instinctively knows what he is not allowed to handle, so when he gets his hands on an iPhone or a Kindle or a piece of mail, he clutches his trophy tightly with both hands and runs away with his loot. Today he found my sister’s Valentine to him in a stack of mail his parents did not think he could reach. He carried the Valentine around for an hour, alternately “reading” it and commenting on the Auburn/Kentucky game.
When nap time approached we began to play bullfight. He ran at me in his walker at top speed while I waved his nap blanket at him and shouted, “Toro! Toro! Little Bull!” while running at him and sweeping the blanket over the top of his head as he tried to grab it. He would then spin on his heels and we would charge again until both of us were tired enough for naps.
Once tucked in my lap, Rob was asleep after only two verses of “The Camptown Races”.
Chas, most babies go through a period when they don’t want to go to strangers, doesn’t matter how social the baby is, it’s a normal phase. It seems that it usually comes up as they are learning to explore their world (crawling, scooting, etc.)–they want to move away from Mommy and then go back to her, not go to someone else.
My mom never put any of us (as far as I know) in church nurseries or children’s church, and that was a decision I intended to follow with my own children. I thought it a real blessing that our church up north, when a new group of mothers started having lots of babies about three years ago, chose to have babies in the service. Not that it was a church requirement, but that the mothers basically all agreed on that, and the church backed them up. (That means we were willing to handle some baby noise, and we learned the babies’ names and interacted with the children before and after services.) So when they came down today, to a nursery they didn’t know, they didn’t have any sense that they “should” put her in the nursery, even though she may have been the only baby past the halfway mark when the babies go to the nursery. Hearing babies fuss a little is a tiny price to pay for the joy of having them in the service, knowing they are hearing of Jesus from their tiniest days, seeing that two-year-olds already know the doxology or other repeated service elements, having them really part of the church body. In a church that has babies in it, it isn’t only the nursery workers who get to know the babies and toddlers–it’s the whole church. I was really happy they’d already made that decision, that the baby goes to church with parents, and didn’t have to wonder today what to do. That was one small loss in coming to this church (among most changes being neutral or gains)–that for half the service, the infants and toddlers go to the nursery. I loved it that they were in the service up north. We did have a few women and teen girls who watched over nursery duty, ready to head downstairs if anyone did want to take a baby to the nursery, a particularly fussy baby or a visitor. But with an attendance of 50-60 people, I sometimes counted six or seven babies under a year in the service–and that was really precious. It isn’t the “culture” in every church (my mom and my sister both went against church cultures to keep their babies with them), but it’s especially precious when it is.
I love hearing little ones in the service. Always makes me smile, however, when my littles were the ones making noise, I thought it was terrible – way too loud and disruptive. We don’t get wee babies in the toddler room usually, but sometimes the mama just needs a break and then we get to hold them. 🙂 🙂
Our pastor stays the sounds that babies & toddlers make are all “part of the liturgy.” My favorite toddler in the row in front of me is passed from mom to aunt to grandma along with her stuffed turtle throughout the service. She usually is wearing cowgirl boots and wiggles her little index finger to say ‘hi’ to those of us in the row behind her. 🙂
After watering, I spent the evening sitting on the front porch, doing some reading and then talking to our former cop reporter who just acquired his very first dog and was looking for advice.
I love my front porch, it sits high above the sidewalk so it has a privacy factor, yet also allows you to be part of the parade of people & dogs who all walk by.
Wandering Views 
Most of you know my rant: 😦 Husband’s cancer diagnosis.
🙂 It is one of the better ones to have, however. We know God lets nothing touch us that is not for His glory and our good. We have prayer warriors. We have health care available.
🙂 Our out of state daughter, son and SIL are on their way here as I type. They will visit her sisters on the way here or back. I am so glad my children keep in touch and make the effort to see one another when possible. I am grateful for good parents for my grandchildren.
🙂 So many things for which to be grateful.
LikeLiked by 6 people
🙂 In the midst of a one-week break from 2nd shift childsitting. Still have some after-school childsitting, and took care of him for a couple hours this morning before his dad picked him up, as his mom is at “Boy Scout University”. That is a one-day event with a variety of classes to take, and she’ll get a badge or something to go on her uniform.
LikeLiked by 5 people
🙂 (: Flyboy, out 21-year-old son, was out for the evening last night. Around 9:30 he called and said to Mrs. B: “The first thing you need to know is that I’m all right.”
On his way home, less than a mile away, he had been rear-ended waiting to make a left turn. The road is one lane each way, but widens to the right at the intersection to let through traffic get by. The other driver must not have been paying attention and didn’t see him in time to go around. Both drivers were fine but there were pieces of both cars all over the place.
While Flyboy was still in the car, he saw a young man jogging away from the scene with a dog. He didn’t realize at the time that the jogger was the other driver. He got out and walked back to the other car only to find nobody in it.
By the time we got there a fire rescue team and police had arrived. A good Samaritan was also there, having stopped to direct traffic around the cars and debris until the police got there. Our car was driveable enough that Flyboy had pulled it off to the side. One back corner of the car was bashed in and the car was not safe to drive anywhere. I think the other car also wasn’t driveable.
After a little while the jogger came back without the dog and identified himself as the driver of the other car. The police immediately cuffed him, I guess because he had left the scene. I heard a little of their conversation. He was worried about his dog. He didn’t sound fully coherent – he said something about having been rear-ended, which made no sense. Maybe he was just rattled. The police took him across the street to assess him. We’re not sure what happened to him after that.
🙂 Flyboy is fine, got home in time to finish a school assignment that was due at midnight (online), and went to work this morning.
🙂 He was calm throughout, and conducted himself appropriately with the rescue crew and police.
🙂 We are short one car and probably will have to replace it – I expect insurance to call it totalled.
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That was supposed to start with 🙂 😦 but I muffed the frownie.
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So glad he is ok, other driver too (though sounds like he could have bought himself a bit of trouble in this).
🙂 Made it through the 2nd week at our new office. We found much more comfortable chairs which helps, but the atmosphere remains pretty inappropriate. Most of my co-workers think the executive with our company who picked out these spots needs to come work in one of them for 8 hours.
🙂 I’m pretty sure it will work out eventually to split my time somewhat with working from home on some days. There’s a morning meeting near my house I’ll be covering Wednesday so I’ll probably ask to spend that day working from home.
🙂 For a year I’ve wanted to do a project type story on homeowners who decide to restore their old homes with original materials, etc. — to preserve rather than remodel. But when our new editor came in, she was unimpressed with the idea so I pretty much dropped it. But she’s off on medical leave for about a month and her assistant who’s filling in, a young reporter/editor who’s rising fast (and is a very good writer) loves the idea when I pitched it to him this week. So I’m going to get back to it.
I hope to focus on a woman who bought a 2-story Queen Ann Victorian near the harbor about a year ago — Real Estate Guy had let me peek inside when it was about to go up for auction and it was in pretty bad shape, everyone hoped someone would get it to restore and not to tear down or ruin with a cheap remodel effort. She’s doing a full restoration and is even posting a blog and has a FB page “Victorian by the Bay” which makes it a natural for a story. Problem is, she says it’s too “messy” right now for a story — I keep trying to tell her the “mess” is a big part of what I want to showcase. 🙂 I’ll keep working on her. She seems very nice and also is new to our area.
😦 Two men in their 20s were shot and killed on one of our streets the other night (close to the waterfront, about a mile below where I live). One was shot in the head, the other shot multiple times. Sounds gang-related (and that’s the area where gangs are still prevalent). That means probably more shootings to come as each side retaliates.
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🙂 Eliana Jeanette is here and doing well. That’s my thanks for the entire year.
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🙂 Baby S is here and sleeping. That’s plenty of praise for this afternoon. 🙂
It took an hour to get her to sleep–she was mad that a stranger was holding her and not her mommy. But I talked to her, sang to her, and otherwise just loved her for a while. Her calm periods grew longer and longer, and finally her crying wasn’t angry crying but self-soothing, and she dropped off on a blanket on the floor. (She was arching her back and screaming whenever I put it in her bouncy chair, so I laid a blanket on the floor instead and that worked.) She’s a bit over seven months, has two teeth, is beginning to be mobile, and it isn’t a good “phase” to be left for several hours with people she hasn’t seen since Christmas. But I’m good at getting babies to sleep (usually quicker than that), but never succeed in having them stay asleep once I put them down, so having a babe who has been asleep more than an hour is good. She has a reputation for being a happy baby, so hopefully feeding her and playing with her will go better than that first hour!
Her parents liked the condo and what we have done to it, being particularly complimentary about our “special areas” (my husband’s studio / guest room, my office / craft area). By the time they get home, I imagine all of us will be about ready to call it a night. But they’ll go with us to church tomorrow (which all of us are looking forward to) and then eat lunch with us–my husband is making burgers, so we’ll have some time to visit tomorrow.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Cheryl, I saw that as an advantage in Becky’s method. She took hers to church, They stayed in the nursery, but also, all of the women wanted to hold her baby. And she let them. The baby didn’t care who held them as long as somebody did. I was amused that at the end of the service, Becky had to collect her children before leaving.
They all turned out well.
The youngest turns eight today.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sometime in the last couple or more decades, it has become popular to keep a baby in one of those baby carriers. I would see babies in church in a carrier rather than being held. I always held my babies and toddlers (when the toddlers wanted or needed to be held), and couldn’t understand why some would give up that closeness for the carriers.
Also, from a strictly practical perspective, those carriers look awkward to carry, especially as the babies get heavier. The parent needs to hold the carrier out from their body a bit to avoid getting hit with it.
Not to say that there aren’t times they could come in handy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, I think the carriers are awful. I mean the carseats that have a handle and they just pick them up. What is wonderful are the cloth carriers, like the ergo, that hold the baby nestled up to mommy. Right where the baby needs to be. I had the privilege of giving one to my youngest.
LikeLiked by 3 people
😀 I got to keep my grandson Rob for 4 hours this afternoon while his parents attended training for Children’s Sunday School workers at our church. My wife is getting over an illness and was afraid she might be contagious, so I had Rob, Arnold Weaver and Arnold’s sister Sally by myself.
Rob will be 9 months old this week. He has been running at high speeds in his walker for a while, but has only just learned to crawl. Now he can get into everything. He instinctively knows what he is not allowed to handle, so when he gets his hands on an iPhone or a Kindle or a piece of mail, he clutches his trophy tightly with both hands and runs away with his loot. Today he found my sister’s Valentine to him in a stack of mail his parents did not think he could reach. He carried the Valentine around for an hour, alternately “reading” it and commenting on the Auburn/Kentucky game.
When nap time approached we began to play bullfight. He ran at me in his walker at top speed while I waved his nap blanket at him and shouted, “Toro! Toro! Little Bull!” while running at him and sweeping the blanket over the top of his head as he tried to grab it. He would then spin on his heels and we would charge again until both of us were tired enough for naps.
Once tucked in my lap, Rob was asleep after only two verses of “The Camptown Races”.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Chas, most babies go through a period when they don’t want to go to strangers, doesn’t matter how social the baby is, it’s a normal phase. It seems that it usually comes up as they are learning to explore their world (crawling, scooting, etc.)–they want to move away from Mommy and then go back to her, not go to someone else.
My mom never put any of us (as far as I know) in church nurseries or children’s church, and that was a decision I intended to follow with my own children. I thought it a real blessing that our church up north, when a new group of mothers started having lots of babies about three years ago, chose to have babies in the service. Not that it was a church requirement, but that the mothers basically all agreed on that, and the church backed them up. (That means we were willing to handle some baby noise, and we learned the babies’ names and interacted with the children before and after services.) So when they came down today, to a nursery they didn’t know, they didn’t have any sense that they “should” put her in the nursery, even though she may have been the only baby past the halfway mark when the babies go to the nursery. Hearing babies fuss a little is a tiny price to pay for the joy of having them in the service, knowing they are hearing of Jesus from their tiniest days, seeing that two-year-olds already know the doxology or other repeated service elements, having them really part of the church body. In a church that has babies in it, it isn’t only the nursery workers who get to know the babies and toddlers–it’s the whole church. I was really happy they’d already made that decision, that the baby goes to church with parents, and didn’t have to wonder today what to do. That was one small loss in coming to this church (among most changes being neutral or gains)–that for half the service, the infants and toddlers go to the nursery. I loved it that they were in the service up north. We did have a few women and teen girls who watched over nursery duty, ready to head downstairs if anyone did want to take a baby to the nursery, a particularly fussy baby or a visitor. But with an attendance of 50-60 people, I sometimes counted six or seven babies under a year in the service–and that was really precious. It isn’t the “culture” in every church (my mom and my sister both went against church cultures to keep their babies with them), but it’s especially precious when it is.
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I love hearing little ones in the service. Always makes me smile, however, when my littles were the ones making noise, I thought it was terrible – way too loud and disruptive. We don’t get wee babies in the toddler room usually, but sometimes the mama just needs a break and then we get to hold them. 🙂 🙂
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I always offer to hold babies in the church service if I know the mom. I just love to hold babies – it is a blessing to me.
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Our pastor stays the sounds that babies & toddlers make are all “part of the liturgy.” My favorite toddler in the row in front of me is passed from mom to aunt to grandma along with her stuffed turtle throughout the service. She usually is wearing cowgirl boots and wiggles her little index finger to say ‘hi’ to those of us in the row behind her. 🙂
After watering, I spent the evening sitting on the front porch, doing some reading and then talking to our former cop reporter who just acquired his very first dog and was looking for advice.
I love my front porch, it sits high above the sidewalk so it has a privacy factor, yet also allows you to be part of the parade of people & dogs who all walk by.
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I love my front porch. But I have never ever seen anybody walk by.
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