Iheartfaces-Blue

This week's challenge was blue. As you can imagine, I have a lot of blue in my life. Blue is my favorite color. Always has been. Good thing, huh? Now I have some pink. Turns out I really like pink too.

These are my kiddos, doing their thang, being who they really are, even picking their nose. Love it.

Check out all the rest of the blue challenge contestants, there is some really phenomenal stuff!!

This article from Elle (h/t Instapundit) has me amazed. It's definitely adult, and definitely secular, but so over the top in both areas, it's like a case study in what's wrong with the world.

The fact that women are selling their virginity is as old as sin itself. I won't comment on that. We've told, explicitly shown and encouraged young women to think of sex as tool, as a biological function, a scientific experimentation, a toy and a business for far to long to pretend I'm shocked when they treat it as such. News flash, nothing is sacred, everything is for sale.

No, the sentence that sent me reeling was this one: "the highest bidder, at $3.7 million, was an Australian businessman, and he reconciled with his wife."

He reconciled with his wife. He was married, although apparently separated, and while on this hiatus he makes bids for a young woman's virginity and his WIFE TAKES HIM BACK????

I'm sorry. Soliciting prostitution, desiring sex with a younger woman badly enough to pay 3.7 million for it, and being anxious to the point of idiocy to be a girl's first sexual partner would all give me serious pause in the reconciliation department.

I'm not in favor of divorce in most situations, I would prefer carefully considered separations that end in reconciliation. I actually believe that separation should only be a step during which both parties are working diligently on themselves in order to come back together and work toward an intimate relationship. It shouldn't be a "hey let's see if living apart works, no, well, ok let's just put some duct tape on it and keep rolling" kind of thing. It certainly should not be a time of experimentation in other relationships! Especially one night stands you just paid 3.7 million dollars for.

I think both he and his wife are fools.

These are the things that make me wonder if I'm the 2 yo or they are.

This rant is now over :-)

Iheartfaces-contemplative

This week's challenge was a very easy pick for me. Even though it is pre-digital point and shoot (and therefore scanned), it's my favorite shot of him and the one that immediately came to mind with the catagory name. This is my oldest on his 4th birthday. He was train obsessed, so we took him to Rusk, Texas to ride a steam locomotive (or as he said, a stinkamotive). He was so excited he barely spoke the entire ride. That's my little man, when he gets really emotional, he gets really quiet and thoughtful. He is now 13, taller than me and not quite so train obsessed, but I still see him in my mind as this little man.

iheartfaces-nostalgia

Another challenge, but I'm too late to enter the contest this week. Ah well, the challenge encouraged me to take a picture I've been meaning to take for a while.

I found a picture years ago of my great-grandmother bathing my mother in a gigantic bowl on her front porch. I don't own the picture, but I just loved it. A few year after that, my daughter Rose died and it brought me great comfort to picture Rose being bathed by my Granny. Granny loved babies, so I just knew she was there to welcome Rose, bathe her, care for her as I could not.

And now I have a baby girl here, in my arms, to love and care for, so today we got out a big bread bowl :

iheartfaces-crazy silly faces

Another iheartfaces challenge. I'm having a blast with these! All of my entries have been on my kids blog, as they are mostly pics of the kids, but I think I'm going to be moving them over to here as they are really about my hobby (or at least one of them).You'd think with 8 kids I wouldn't need to use someone else's kid in a challenge, but I just love this pic of one of my favorite little girls. I was getting ready to take some pics for her momma and new baby sister and R was helping me get my settings right. Isn't she gorgeous? She's got a dynamite personality too, as you can see.

I've got another of her baby sister that's pretty darn cute too. I might share that one later this week, if you're lucky. :-)

Falling in a deep hole

My little girl is having seizures. Out of the blue, no fever, no warning. I would love to say that I am perfectly calm about this, that I understand that these things happen, with no adverse effects, all the time. Especially in my family. But it's never happened like this, not so many, so frequently. Add to that the fact that I volunteer with a population where I can name at least 3 children who started with seizures and ended up with brain cancer.....you get a big heaping dose of crazy.

I would also love to say that I trust God so much that I'm not worried. It's not really that I don't trust Him, but I realize that my comfort is not His priority. After all, He was in control when my babies died. He was in control when Rose was treated as trash. He was in control when I was abused as a child. None of that changes His sovereignty, or His absolute goodness. These are the things I know:

I know He loves me, and my daughter, enough to allow His son to be treated as trash, be abused, and go through intense physical discomfort, even unto death. I know that if the choice is between someone trusting in Him for salvation and my comfort, He will choose salvation for them. I know there is never pain without purpose. I know I will never understand that or desire it.

So I am fearful, and sad, and angry. But honestly, I have no where else to go. I can either go through this, trust that it is good, and keep running to Him or go through this believing He doesn't care, doesn't listen and do it by myself. If I've got to fall through a deep hole, I want Him at the bottom of it.

What's wrong with public education?

So I’m listening to Diane Rehm on NPR (I know, I know, but I gotta know how they think)and she’s interviewing Bill Gates Sr. http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/04/29.php is where you can listen to the interview, I don't know if it includes the caller I reference. I do NOT like this man. He was talking about the Gates foundation and how one of their objectives is to help public education. So of course she asked what was wrong with public education and he basically threw teachers under the bus. According to him, it’s only the lowest scoring college students that want to be teachers, and they are trained poorly, so of course our children go uneducated. So someone calls in and confronts that. Her daughter is a teacher and loves teaching but the constant discipline problems she is dealing with with NO support from parents or admin is driving her out of the field. His response? Well, if the teacher were properly trained to be super engaging and really keep the kids attention and MAKE them WANT to learn then there wouldn’t be any problems. The teacher just needs to try harder.

At that point I stopped listening because my head was exploding with all manner of curse words and the 3 youngest were in the car with me. I cannot believe he actually believes that if a teacher was just engaging enough, all our problems with no parental interest or support and difficult discipline issues would be solved. If I’m remembering right, for about 100 years most kids were taught in a small school where there was one book for each subject that the teacher read from while the children were expected to listen quietly. There was no AV equipment, no unit studies, no internet interactive sites, not really even any effort to be engaging and make the kids want to learn. We expected them to learn anyway. And they DID. That’s the really amazing part, some of our best thinkers were guys who just read and thought a lot. Nobody *made* them want it, they did it because they wanted it for themselves.

It’s not that I think teaching on level and trying to be relevant and engaging are bad. I do projects, we use interactive sites at times, we watch films. But that is not where the bulk of learning is done. The bulk of their learning comes from reading, writing, thinking, and application. Nothing fancy.

Of course this is coming from a man who when asked about Bill Jr as a kid, his response was along the lines of: He was really curious and interested in everything. He loved to read. That’s really unusual.

If he really believes that it’s unusual for kids to be curious, interested and either read or be read to, well, I must have the most unusual family on earth. All 8 fit that description. ALL 8. To varying degrees, but all 8.

I do believe teachers need more pay, more respect, more of whatever they ask for really, but I would really love to hear at least someone place the blame where it belongs, on the families who don't put value on education.