Boo!

Ha! Scared you. It has been nearly a month since I posted, so I know you were not expecting anything. Just wait - this is going to be a bumper crop of a week . . .

Ed plays The Tempest

It had been awhile since I had posted anything about the music in our home so I shot this video of Ed playing The Tempest tonight. I enjoyed prepping the video for the blog but also going back and seeing clips from the last two years.

Here is a clip from a year ago and here is a clip from two years ago.

One of the things that I love about blogging is that it creates a readily accessible family history. If I were not blogging I may have never shot these videos and even if I had, I would be hard pressed to find them. Now, with just a click or two, there they are. It is wonderful.

I will also have to catch Miss Bookworm on the violin soon so you can hear what a wonderful job she is doing. We also have two brand new piano players in our home - F.G. and Buddy. I assume you have heard enough renditions of Mary Had a Little Lamb, so I will hold off on posting a sample of their work for a little while.

Infectious Thoughts

Anna has been on a baby doll kick lately. She can get absorbed for an hour or more caring for one of these dolls. At first, I thought this was a good thing. Now I know better.

One can’t underestimate the power of thoughts. There is not a single thing we do that we don’t first have the thought of doing it – whether it is a day or a millisecond in advance. Some thoughts even have the power to spread from person to person like an infectious disease. This is why Anna’s doll phase is a bad thing; she is spreading thoughts of babies around our home.

A few weeks ago I came home and found mom down in the school room. When I sat down to talk with her, she was rocking one of Anna’s dolls and Anna was helping. CrazyMom told me that Anna likes to act as if CrazyMom is the mom and Anna is mom’s helper. I did not think much of it until Anna wandered off in the house. As CrazyMom and I continued talking, I noticed that she was still rocking the baby.

“Um, Hun. Anna is gone you know.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, I just noticed that you are still rocking the baby doll.”

“Yeah,” she said and did not stop.

A few days later I came down for breakfast and CrazyMom was feeding a baby doll a bottle. I quickly glanced around and did not see Anna.


“Um, Hun.”

“Anna was just right here!” CrazyMom protested before I had a chance to say what I was thinking.


I let it go. But then I saw the shopping list on the fridge. Notice what it says on the top right. When I asked CrazyMom about it she assured me it was just something for Anna's dolls.


And it is not just CrazyMom, either. I found K.D., who is particularly sensitive about gender roles, feeding a baby doll the other day. I knew then that I had an epidemic on my hands.

I have been working hard to eliminate these infectious thoughts and I thought I was making good progress for awhile. But CrazyMom keeps making these comments despite my disapproving looks. “Oh, look at these cute shoes,” she says as we pass a clearance rack at Meijer. “Now all I need is a little boy to put them on.” And last night when CrazyMom and I were discussing sleeping arrangements in our home I said, “We could always put another bed in Anna’s room.”

“Or a crib,” she replied.

Real World Math: Biblical Equations and Downed Trees

The other day I was sitting in a small group with some college students answering questions about the book of James. Being more inclined towards math than English, we started discussing which mathematical expression best answered the questions.

“What does James 1:19 tell us about the relationship between listening and speaking?”

Note: James 1:19 says, “This you know, my beloved brethren. But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger.”

Our group debated the merits of:

Listening > Speaking (We should definitely listen more than we speak.)
Listening = 2 x Speaking (God gave us two ears and one mouth.)
Listening >> Speaking (Maybe our listening should be much greater than our speaking.)

Then on Thursday CrazyMom called me at work to let me know two trees fell over in the yard. The thought I had was:

high winds + soggy soil + evergreens = lots of work staking up trees



When I got home, GrandpaR and I walked out to survey the situation.

“We ought to just get out the chain saw,” GrandpaR said.

“Yeah, probably,” I replied.

But we spent the next hour trying to set the trees back up and stake them. Surveying the pathetic results on the first tree, I headed for the garage to get the chain saw. Turns out the real math equation was:

high winds + soggy soil + evergreens = firewood

A Night without Me

“Blah blah blah,” was all CrazyMom was hearing, I am sure. I had been gone all day and did not get home until 10pm after a day of school and parent conferences. When I arrived home, I found CrazyMom lying on the floor in front of the gas fireplace with a stuffed tiger for a pillow, a green blanket, and a book.

I was still a little fired up from my day and had no trouble filling the airwaves. CrazyMom patiently laid her book on her chest as she listened for awhile.

“I got three haircuts done after dinner,” she finally interjected.

“Great!” I replied and then started back in with my captivating stories – “blah blah blah.”

“I also was able to get quizzing practice done with both Ed and Buddy before dinner,” she said interrupting again.

Abrupt topic changes don’t faze me since they happen all of the time. CrazyMom will even say, “Did you know she just brought home another child?” referring to some online friend of hers where the “she” is a completely different “she” from the last sentence she said to me.

Undaunted, I moved from stories about parent conferences to how I solved a software glitch with a robot the robotics club had built.

“Not only did I get quizzing practice done, I also read with F.G. before I had to cook dinner,” said CrazyMom.

“Hmmm. Seems like you got a lot done tonight.”

“Yeah. It was like I had all of this extra time.”

Finally, the dam broke and a wave of understanding washed over me.

“Oh, I see. You had all of this extra time because I wasn’t home,” I said feeling a little dejected.

“Well, it was interesting to observe how much more time I had this evening without you,” she said as she laughed and smiled.

Now it may be true that CrazyMom had more time that evening, but I am sure it is clear to all of us that it was not nearly as exciting without me around.

If I die, will you . . .

“If I die, will you cut the kids’ toenails?” CrazyMom asked me this morning when I came down from taking my shower. She was on the floor huddled over Buddy’s feet wielding a silver pair of toe clippers.

“Of course,” I said to reassure her. “They will probably be crawling all over me and cut me with their nails. Then I will line them up in the shop and cut all their toenails with some power tool,” I then said to un-assure her.

CrazyMom is not overly prone to worrying about the future, but occasionally when she is doing some task that she thinks I would never remember to do, she worries that if she were gone it would never get done. It is at these times that she says, "If I die, will you . . ." I wish that I had been writing down all of these critical items over the years.

Now if it is something that CrazyMom is particularly concerned about me doing if she were gone, she instead makes me promise.

“CrazyD, promise me that if I die you will check on the kids every night before you go to bed,” she says with a serious look.


You see, the last thing CrazyMom does every night is to go into all of the kids’ rooms and check on every sleeping child. With an arbitrary adjustment of the covers here or a moving of a stuffed animal there, no child is really down for the night unless he/she has had a final check by mom. Of course, I think she just does this because she has to see their faces one last time before bed. Being wired a little differently, I think their cute little faces look pretty much the same as they did two hours earlier when they were put to bed, so the imperativeness of the activity is lost on me. But that is precisely why she makes me promise. It is important to her that the final check is done and she is afraid I won’t do it.

“I will,” I say and although I am an honest and reliable individual, there still seems to be some doubt in CrazyMom’s eyes. Or maybe she is just thinking how it won’t be the same if she is not there to do it.

Of Toilets and Doors

“I just created another problem for you,” CrazyMom said when she found me in my shop struggling with a carpet cleaner in the utility sink. The timing was not great since the problem I was working on had not yet been fully cleared up.

“Um, what is it?” I asked, not wanting to know the answer.

Up to an hour or so ago, it had been a good Saturday. CrazyMom and I had a pre-breakfast meeting where we planned out the day’s itinerary. After a quick meeting with the kids to lay out the plans for the day, we were off and running. There was fun (a French toast breakfast, a trip to the YMCA, basketball games, and a pizza dinner) mixed with work (piano and violin practice, science lessons, and cleaning) which made for a nicely balanced day. CrazyMom and I had envisioned a few family games in the evening, but that is not how it played out.

“Dad! Dad!” Buddy yelled as he burst into my office. “There is water all over the bathroom floor!”

Heading down to the basement I found CrazyMom already on the scene with water coming out of the bathroom soaking the carpet as well as permeating into the shop on one side and the storage room on the other. The sheer quantity of water indicated that a child without a savvy mechanical understanding had been operating the handle on the clogged toilet.

This threw CrazyMom, me, and a handful of kids into full damage control. After working the situation over for a good long while, the threat level was lowered from emergent to urgent. At this point, I was left trying to bring closure to the crisis while CrazyMom went to the kitchen to prepare food for a church event tomorrow and the kids were dispatched to get ready for bed – on their own.

The level of excitement among the kids upstairs was a little out of control, but neither CrazyMom or I responded since we were both doing our urgent things.

Then the doors began to slam. If there is one thing that we do not tolerate in our home, it is slamming doors. As the closest parent, CrazyMom was dispatched.

It was a few minutes later that she came and found me in the shop having “just created another problem for [me].”

“Well, see, it was like this,” she said as she started in on a story to provide context for the problem which she was about to reveal. When CrazyMom was explaining to the kids the difference between slamming a door and closing a door, it was not clear that she was getting through to some of the children. In order to assist them in their understanding, a demo was in order and so CrazyMom slammed a door. It turned out to be quite an effective demo. Not only did the children learn how to accurately identify a slamming door, they also learned that the door stop molding may not be able to stop a solid poplar 30” door which is being slammed.

“I guess them slamming a door is not quite like me slamming a door,” CrazyMom said in conclusion.

It was a much easier fix than the water mess. A few finishing nails here and there and it was actually better than before since I was able to adjust the door stop molding for a better fit.

All in all I should not complain. It could have been worse. How? Well, while I was fixing the molding, CrazyMom was in single-parent mode getting the kids bathed and ready for bed. She had to step out of the bathroom in which Anna was bathing to address an issue. While she was in the hall, Anna jumped in the tub, slipped, and hit her head. Luckily, we did not get hit with a third problem – an ER run.

Building a Diffusing Screen - Snow Day Part 2

On Tuesday while we were still at school it was looking pretty likely that there would be a snow day the next day. "What will you do if we have a snow day?" a colleague asked me. "I would go to Home Depot and buy some stuff to build a diffusing screen so I can take better portraits of my kids," I replied. Well, we got our snow day and I hesitated about driving out in the snow, but since I had indicated that I would, I did it. I went out when the roads were probably the worst, but I did get to help push the mail truck up a hill.

Here is the diffusing screen I built using a cloth shower curtain and a few PVC pipes. (The screen goes between the flash and the subject to soften the light.)

I just had time to snap a couple of photos today, but not time to really work with it. As you can see in the photo below, now I need to make a reflector to add a little fill on the shadow side.

Snow Day (Part 1)

Today we had a snow day and the kids and I were off from school. As we were hiking around in some woods by our house, the kids led me to a fort that someone had built. Here is a photo of Buddy getting ready to go into the fort and then of all of us inside.



All of the kids also got a chance to hang from a small tree bent over from the ice.

Painting on Saturday

This morning as CrazyMom and I were getting ready, we were talking over the day we had before us. With just a couple of basketball games on the schedule, it was a relatively light day for us, so I immediately starting thinking of what we could do with the kids. For some reason, painting popped into my head.

When I went down to set up a painting studio in my shop, the mold in the tempora paint reminded me of how long it had been since we had painted. After a half hour of washing out containers, re-liquefying pigmented paste, and establishing four easels so we could work with just two shifts of painters, the painting began.

I had the kids pick out their favorite piece from the day and here they are with it. By the way, they wanted me to tell you that Anna's painting is of a rainbow over Moses and the burning bush.