On 28 October 1886, New York City held its very first ticker-tape parade as the Statue of Liberty was dedicated. A gift from the people of France to America, the statue was modeled after the Roman goddess Libertas, the goddess of freedom. The statue's original French designation, "La Liberté éclairant le monde" (Liberty enlightening the world), was an apt title for its purpose: a symbol of freedom's ability to better mankind and the United States' dedication to that principle.

When fundraising for the base of the statue faltered, fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts solicited Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus to donate a poem to help the cause. After an initial refusal, Lazarus--a woman deeply involved in the causes of poor immigrants into the United States--was convinced by a friend that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants who sailed by it on their way into the U.S. Lazarus penned a sonnet that she titled, "The New Colossus", a reference to the ancient Greek Colossus. The text of that sonnet was engraved on a plaque and mounted inside the lower level of the Statue of Liberty's base.

The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The statue came quickly to symbolize not only American freedom as a beacon of hope to the world, but also the offer of that freedom to any who would seek refuge on American shores and citizenship in the United States. The torch of the statue--originally intended to represent "Liberty's light to the world"--became a lighthouse lamp showing the way from poverty-stricken, oppressive lands and guiding would-be immigrants seeking the "Land of Opportunity" to America's welcoming shores.

Today--over 125 years removed from the dedication of the beacon of liberty that has come to be a symbol of the United States itself--the irony of Lazarus' sonnet weighs heavily. Today, many Americans don't seem interested in welcoming the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...the homeless, or the tempest-tossed" into our borders. Many have forgotten Lady Liberty's title of "Mother of Exiles" and would damp out the light which "From her beacon-hand glowed world-wide welcome."

In the early 1900's, great numbers of immigrants from the Old World fled the abject poverty of their homelands in hopes of being able to provide means for the survival of their families and looked up at the giant statue as they sailed into New York Harbor full of hope. Not many could have even read the English writing of Lazarus' poem which was engraved on the bronze plaque at the statue's base. After all, impoverished Italian and Irish immigrants were more worried about means for survival than the luxury of studying a new language; avoiding starvation was a more immediate concern for them than becoming multi-lingual. By sheer necessity they integrated American language and culture into their lives, but the perfecting of accents and grammar were hardly high on their "to-do" list and nor should they have been!

The influx of Old World immigrants was hardly welcomed by many Americans of the day. Concerns about potential increases in crime and negative impacts on the economy abounded. There can be little doubt that both took place to some degree, but the Chicken Little worries of Americans who claimed that the mass immigrations would plunge the United States into an abyss of crime and economic destruction were proved to be full only of sound and fury, not of real significance. On the contrary, the American culture and economy were ultimately strengthened and bolstered by immigrated ingenuity. The intellectual contributions of Albert Einstein and Joseph Pulitzer (both first-generation Americans) and the innovative ideas of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford (both born to parents who were first-generation immigrants) stand out as prominent examples, but countless millions of smaller contributions go largely unheralded.

America couldn't be who she is without the immigrants who were welcomed by Lady Liberty. Unfortunately, we seem to have come full-circle in the present day.

Even while the New Colossus is glorified as the symbol of all that is American, fences are constructed around her borders--alas for Lazarus' "golden door"!--to keep out the "wretched refuse" that America no longer has room in its heart to tolerate. Again the cries of warning that we shall be overrun by crime and economic woe are heard in any discussions of immigration policy. While there is, of course, no way to prevent every bad apple from crossing our "hallowed" borders, Americans who have grown accustomed to being able to simply turn on a faucet and get clean water to brew their fancy coffee or visit a fast food drive-thru for a midnight snack gaze down their noses at impoverished "illegal aliens" who sneak past the electrified fences that seal off the "Land of Opportunity". Americans who take for granted owning a vehicle, having a bank account, and filling their pantries with nearly enough rations to survive a nuclear holocaust are bitter that immigrants who can barely feed themselves and their families don't speak "The President's English" (and don't do so with their own favored accent, no less).

Today it is not the Irish or the Italian or the Polish immigrant upon whom the disdain is heaped, but it is heaped nonetheless. The undesireables hail from the New World these days and seek to cross into our borders from the South, where no New Colossus stands to greet them. Taking the menial jobs that many Americans consider to be beneath them, these new immigrants seek to make a living picking the crops or cleaning the homes or building the structures of the very ones who demean and despise them--no less than their Irish and Italian and Polish predecessors were demeaned and despised.

There is no question that certain policies and procedures should be followed to grant entry and citizenship to our great nation, but at what point did we decide we should make it so difficult or so rationed? At what point did we turn from the lessons that we learned a century ago that--far from weakening America--immigration strengthened us and made us better?

At what point do we need to retire that plaque upon which Lazarus' poem is inscribed and commission another which tells of the darker truth of our current views and policies? At what point is "The New Colossus" no longer appropriate or applicable?

Whatever point that might be, I hope it never comes. If it is too late and we have already crossed that point, may we turn full-about and full steam to the engines.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Let America be America again.
Let her be the dream she used to be. ~ Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again

When I was young, we had a Labrador named Sampson. For any of you who haven't had the pleasure of owning a Labrador: they are one of the most loyal, good-natured, and loving breeds of dogs. They love to play just as much as they love to sleep at your feet and while they make excellent hunting dogs if trained to be, to describe them as intelligent would be a bit of a reach. Anyway... we had a Labrador when I was young. He was something of a runt even though he was a purebred and he had a red coat rather than the normal yellow, chocolate, or black coats common to his breed.

As he lived indoors, he had the opportunity--indeed he had the habit--of waking me up in the mornings by flopping his head onto my bed and patiently staring at me while breathing heavily until I roused. Oftentimes, he would bring a gift to me as well. The gift would consist of whatever socks he had scrounged up from various rooms in the house that morning. Many times he would have acquired half a dozen various socks, crammed them all into his mouth, and brought them to me as a token of affection.

What more could he offer, after all? Socks were some of his favorite things--the smellier, the better. How could anyone bring a greater gift?

To me, of course, it was vile. Waking to a "gift" of dirty, slobbery socks was not high on my list of pleasurable ways to regain consciousness and begin a day.

In the memory of all those socks offered on all those mornings lies an analogy to our offerings to God. In the past, God gave a very specific list of what offerings He desired for any of hundreds of different circumstances. The Jewish religion, of course, is built upon these decrees. When Christ came, however, truths were revealed that made things much simpler. Christ said that His coming fulfilled all the obligations of the old Hebrew rituals (Matt. 5:17). The Apostle Paul later wrote to the Romans that the old rituals and traditions (the Law of sin and death) were completely fulfilled on our behalf by Christ and had been replaced by a "Law of the Spirit" (Rom. 8:1-4). Under the new covenant, no offerings for atonement are needed--Christ has satisfied them all by His own sacrifice--but how can I express my gratitude to God for all the blessings that he sends my way?

Sampson brought me his most prized finds--the dirty, slobbery socks that he offered me every morning--as a token of affection or love or gratitude, but to me they were just gross. If I wanted socks, I could go get a clean pair from a drawer filled with dozens of pairs. What was so valuable to him didn't even register the slightest value to me.

And so we come back to the real question: "What do you get the God who has everything?" After all, as He pointed out in Psalm 50:12, "The world is mine and everything in it." This is a God who is clothed in the splendor of the universe and has the entire Earth as His footstool.

How can I thank you? What can I bring?
What can these poor hands lay at the feet of a King?

There is something that I possess that God does not, however. There is a self-imposed limit on the riches of Most High that gives me something which is uniquely mine: myself--my heart, my mind, my will. In giving me free will, God has set a limit on His own power over me. He could, of course, with a single word exercise all the power needed to force me into submission to Him--to give myself completely over to Him--but this is not the same as my freely choosing to love him. There is a great difference in the relationship I share with a wife who has freely given her affection to me and the relationship I might have with a woman who has been persuaded--by whatever power or trickery--into a marriage with me. God could easily make automatons who always chose to offer themselves to Him, but this isn't what He desires. He wants us to freely choose to give ourselves to Him just as He gives Himself to us (and thus become the true archetype of that relationship for which human marriage is only a poor reflection).

I never scolded Sampson for bringing the socks to me. I understood it as the best token of his affection that he could possibly conjure up. It wasn't the token that I coveted, though. Rather, it was the affection itself. I didn't need a tangible offering of thanks for the love and care I gave him freely. His thankfulness was evident in the mutual affection that he gave to me. Actions speak louder than words, as they say.

God doesn't need my own versions of the dirty, slobbery socks that Sampson brought Him. Rather, God desires that I give myself to Him as a loving bride gives herself to her husband: in each moment of affection and love. Where the analogy of Sampson and the socks breaks down is in this: God's desire is to build us up to the powerful, loving, glorified images of Christ that He always intended us to be. I had no power to transform Sampson into a human, but God does have to power to transform us into gods in our own right, transforming us "into His image with ever-increasing glory" (2 Cor. 3:18).

That is something that all the socks in the world could never buy.

Was stoked to go home to the Chuck for Xmas. The trip was going to be action-packed with little downtime, but it had been a long time since I'd been home and it was A's first trip there. The itinerary was supposed to be something like:

Monday: Travel all night and arrive in LC in wee hours of Tuesday AM
Tuesday: Sleep off the trip and show off A to everyone
Wednesday: Xmas with parents
Thursday: A's B-Day
Friday: Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Saturday: Xmas with Hoods
Sunday: Xmas with Owens and then back on the road

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Everything went stunningly until Friday. The fun started when we got to Houston for the concert. There were something like a baker's dozen of us who caravaned to the Toyota Center. I drove H, MD, and KD and we arrived about an hour and a half early. We found a Starbucks in The Shops and rallied there. It was about a 10 minute walk from the venue and we made it to the Toyota Center with about 45 minutes until showtime.

Then all hell broke loose.

We had purchased the tickets in three different groups, but they were all in adjacent seats. i had purchased a batch of 8 tickets and my dad had purchased a batch of 3 and another of 2. The ticketing system allows entry with the credit card used to pay or a driver's license of the purchaser. We split up into our respective groups and headed in. When you show your license or CC, it is scanned and the tickets are printed right at the door. There was a SNAFU with one of my dad's tickets, though. While the screen clearly showed he needed 5 tickets printed, the printer only printed 4.

He was directed to the box office window for resolution where he waited and waited and waited in the line without moving. Eventually, all of us who had tickets went ahead and got seats, but his issue wasn't resolved until the show had started. An additional ticket was printed and his group headed up to the seats. When they got there, however, they realized that the twits in the box office had issued another ticket for a seat which was already taken.

The rest of the story is long and annoying, so I'll skip it. It all worked out in the end, but it was some stinky BS that some people had to miss the first 15 minutes of the show because of a SNAFU on the part of the venue.

When the show was over, we decided to hit a Red Lobster on the way back home. Good meal, good times... but not to last.

About halfway through the drive home, I began very suddenly to feel quite ill. I decided I would stop at the next service station, but just then I was hit with an incredible wave of nausea. Luckily, my body gives me a 30-60 second warning when it reaches the point of no return that involves a sudden cold sweat. I'll spare the details, but I had to very quickly pull to the side of the freeway.

Afterward, I felt much better. While this is not common for me, I have experienced similar waves of sickness--most often caused by things I ate. Once they are purged from me, I feel immediately better (if not a bit weak) and then it is over. I thought this was the case here as well. Not so.

MD did the rest of the driving home, but by the time we got back to Sulphur, I began to feel ill again and knew that something more significant than a stomach irritant was in play. Time to skip some more details...

By 7am on Xmas Eve morning, I was in such a state that I needed a trip to the ER. They pumped me full of IV fluids and sent me home to bed around noon. I couldn't do much the rest of the day and missed Xmas at the Hoods, but at least there was no more vomiting. But the ill-effects were not over yet.

I missed Xmas services at church, Xmas dinner on Sunday, and gift exchange Sunday afternoon. I was beginning to worry about being able to make the drive home and decided to try an old trick: a hot bath. I'm not sure what it is about a hot bath, but as long as nausea isn't involved (and by this time it was only a general stomach malaise with which I was dealing) it can work miracles.

It did.

By the evening, I felt well enough to drive home and we began to pack up. It was then that A's fever hit. We had deduced that the illness was a contagious stomach bug of some sort because no fewer than 5 of the family had endured it over the days immediately following when I came down with it. A obviously had it and we needed to get home ASAP. A 12-hour drive would seriously suck, but it was our best hope of being able to get in a position where we could get him to his pediatrician if need arose.

Because I was nearly exhausted, I mapped hotels along the route at which we could spend the night if I could not continue, but about halfway through the trip, A began vomiting. We decided we HAD to make it home. At that point, A couldn't be properly cared-for at a hotel and we figured it was a matter of time before H fell sick as well.

Nine hours into the drive, I began to feel nauseated again and H had to take over. Looking back on things, this nausea was most likely a nervous nausea and not related to the illness. I was physically exhausted after being sick for two days and emotionally exhausted after dealing with the illness, nine hours of driving, and the pressure to make it home after the onset of A's illness.

H performed admirably and we made it home around 9am. By the time we arrived, I was rather incapacitated and unable to help her with our sick 1yr old. Luckily, both he and I lapsed into a near-coma upon getting home. By that evening, I felt 90% better... just in time for H to come down with the same bug.

For that reason we had to cancel Xmas plans in Augusta with H's family. We scheduled a make-up event for January, but Xmas 2011 won't soon be forgotten...

Just popping in quickly because it has been a while. Relatively pedantic stuff here... mostly daily happenings.

The past couple weeks have been extraordinarily busy. I have had an abundance of contract work, some of which was quite challenging. It has literally eaten away most of my free hours and--while I am quite thankful for it and the income it brings--I am borderline exhausted. This is not a good thing as I am only dealing with the very tip of the iceberg during this season.

We will be taking Drew to Louisiana for the first time and that--of itself--is enough to induce high blood pressure. It's not so much that he does not travel well. He always has in the past. Rather, it is the stress involved with getting everything in order and creating contingency plans for a 12+ hour trip in the car with a soon-to-be one-year-old. I'm not sure he will be content to simply ride as he has in the past, but I could be wrong there. We'll see.

Add to that the fact that, once we arrive, we will be on a very packed schedule. There is something to do every day and nearly every hour of every day and I doubt I will be able to do all I would like, even then. Since Drew has never been to La, there are many people who would like to see him for the very first time. There are also folks that I have not seen in a very long time who will be coming in and I'd like to have some time for that. We will have at minimum three separate Christmas celebrations and the dinners or lunches which come along with them. We will also be attending a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert in Houston on one of the days (one of the best shows you can ever see, btw). TONS of things to do and very little time to do them.

Sandwich all that between a couple slices of 12-hour-drive and you've got a pretty frantic start to the Xmas break.

I've also been trying over the past few weeks to construct a DVD of Drew's first year which would include a video\photo montage and small "featurettes" that I have put together and posted on YouTube over the past year. I wanted to have it playing during both of his first b-day parties (one in La and one in Ga) and have it available as something of a party favor to attendees, but I keep having to put it off because of all the contract work I have been taking on. Now we are just 3 days from our departure and I have about a week's worth of work to do on it. Just another added stress, I suppose, but I think I would really love to have it and look back on it later.

In other Drew news, he has been walking around holding on to things for a couple weeks now. He pulls up on just about everything and has even tried letting go for a few seconds. He can sometimes balance, but can't quite take steps, yet. He loves for us to hold his arms and let him walk around that way. He also has finally learned to crawl on all fours rather than belly-crawl. He is WAY faster on his belly, but I was wondering if he would ever do a "true" crawl before he walked. It seem he did. Barely.

He also dislocated his elbow this past Monday. GH texted me to call her ASAP and told me when I did that Drew had done something to hurt his arm in the playpen and he was crying nonstop and not using his arm. I broke away from work to pick him up and, indeed, he was heavily favoring his right arm. He would hold it against his chest in much the same position that one would do so if one were in a sling. Nothing seemed sensitive to the touch when I examined him, but he didn't much like it at all if I flexed the arm.

I originally thought it might have been a clavicle injury, but since GH didn't actually witness what happened, I couldn't be sure. I brought him to the Doc, who suspected a clavicle injury at first as well but was soon after able to quickly diagnose the dislocation (Nursemaid's Elbow) and pop it back into place. Once the pain from the relocation subsbsided mere seconds later, he was fine.

Now the in-laws are in town to take care of Drew while I work and H has an outpatient surgery taken care of. There will be some work on the video this weekend and tons of packing and readying ourselves for the trip to La.

Then off we go into the sunset...

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.

I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then—and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.

For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. ~ John the Apostle, 1 John 4:16

Now what is the deepest in God? His power? No, for power could not make him what we mean when we say God. . .[A] being whose essence was only power would be such a negation of the divine that no righteous worship could be offered him: his service must be fear, and fear only. Such a being, even were he righteous in judgment, yet could not be God. The God himself whom we love could not be righteous were he not something deeper and better still than we generally mean by the word. . .

In one word, God is Love. Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being. . .[L]ove is the heart and hand of his creation; [love] is his right to create, and his power to create as well. The love that foresees creation is itself the power to create. Neither could he be righteous—that is, fair to his creatures—but that his love created them. His perfection is his love. All his divine rights rest upon his love. Ah, he is not the great monarch! The simplest peasant loving his cow, is more divine than any monarch whose monarchy is his glory. If God would not punish sin, or if he did it for anything but love, he would not be the father of Jesus Christ, the God who works as Jesus wrought.

~George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Series Three, "The Creation in Christ"

Many of the people with whom I am closest and respect the most are educators, including--but by no means limited to--my best friend and my wife. Those who pursue a career in education are the ones among us who have one of--if not the--most important and influential jobs in all modern society.

While I hold firmly that parenting is the single greatest influence and predictor of success, school-aged children in the United States spend more waking hours in a classroom on a weekly basis than the spend with their parents. With this perspective, we can see how important the position of educator actually is. If I exclude family members in a list of the 5 most influential people in my life, at least 3 of those 5 would be teachers or professors.

The subject of education and how it is best conducted is one that--while being perpetually important from a societal perspective--is becoming increasingly important to me as my young child gets closer to entering the classroom. It is more than occasionally that I have conversations with my educator wife regarding policies and initiatives implemented in her school system and the data that drives the decisions on these policies and initiatives.

Data can be overwhelming in the best scenarios and can be manipulated and abused to bolster unsound conclusions in the worst scenarios. One of my mantras in any critical thinking exercise is "Correlation does not imply causation!"^[1] Any exercise in examining data and applying it in a responsible manner should be done with that in mind. Most anyone has an agenda of some sort or another and, truthfully, data can be used to back just about any hypothesis. When the amount of data available is as vast as the amount collected in studies of education, it can make your head spin.

A Facebook Friend of mine (who happens also to be an educator whom I respect very highly and who falls into the Top 5 list I mentioned above) recently posted an article highlighting the continued academic success of Massachusetts students^[2] with a comment pointing out that Massachusetts is a unionized state. In a brief interchange between us, he went on to point out that the 5 states which perform best academically have teacher's unions while the bottom 10 ban teacher's unions.

I was intrigued by the statistic and immediately began considering whether the unionization of teachers in a state was a legitimate influence on the academic success of its students. I decided to investigate various factors to determine which factors turned out to be strong predictors of academic success (that is, there is a a strong correlation between rankings by that specific criterion and rankings by academic benchmarks).

I discovered that by far the most consistent predictor of academic success in a given state is the percentage of students eligible for free\reduced lunch. In a related finding, the percentage of students living below the federal poverty level was also a very strong predictor. Factors such as percentage of students living in married-couple homes and percentage of white, non-Hispanic students were also relatively strong, although not nearly as much as free\reduced lunch.

Ultimately, I am not surprised by these results. It is an unfortunate aspect of modern American culture that educators are held to be primarily and solely responsible for the success of their students versus the success of students in other schools or states. Many people fail to account for the very significant impact that non-academic variables have on a child's ability to perform well academically.

Most adults recognize that if they are going through hard times outside of work, their job performance suffers. Likewise, if a child is living below the poverty level in a single-parent home, their academic performance should be expected to be lower. A parent who is struggling to simply make ends meet is more likely to be absent from the child's life for longer periods of the day as they try to hold down two jobs to support the family. That can have a significant impact on the child's emotional stability and therefore the child's ability to perform well in school.

The socio-economic status of a child's parents is also key. Parents who are better off economically are more likely to be better educated. Better educated parents are more likely to be able to help their children succeed academically.

EDIT: After rereading this post a few times, I feel it necessary to point out that the finding that the percentage of white non-Hispanic students has a positive correlation cannot be used to draw any conclusions about the intellectual capacities of various races. As unfortunate as it may be, it is still a fact that non-white Americans are generally fall in lower economic groupings. Combine this with the fact that non-whites (as a whole grouping, that is) have less education overall and you get at the REAL reason for the statistic's predictive power. This statistic points back to the education level of parents and socio-economic status as the true predictors.

Factors which did not pan out to be strong predictors (and some surprisingly so to me) were average teacher salary, student\teacher ratio, and cost-adjusted spending per pupil.

I was able to gather and analyze some data regarding the possible correlation and causation between unionization and academic success of students, as well. It was more complicated than first met the eye, though. My findings on that matter are discussed below along with the details of where I found the data and how I analyzed it to come to the conclusions I shared above.

( The Methods of My Madness -- A detailed look at how I conducted my research )

I never realized how opposed to Calvinism's version of the doctrine of predestination I was until I began to study it. Honestly, I assumed that I simply did not understand it well enough--that perhaps there was some semantical loophole through which it could safely slip in my intellect and faith.

I find no such loophole as of yet. The more I study it, the more repulsive it becomes to me and the more vexatious it is to my spirit.

I am not giving up, though. I will continue to try to understand. I have been referred to a book which is supposed to give a great synopsis of the beauty of the doctrine and I will finish it--although a few pages at a time is all I can abide.

Can anyone help me? Does anyone have a good grasp of the doctrine and a deep conviction of its truth? Could anyone bear with someone like myself who wants to understand it but simply cannot?

If so, I beg your help.

Mom-In-Law came in on Thursday night to spend some time with A and watch him on Saturday.

We watched the World Series game until about 11p while we chatted with her, but alas! we went to bed before the epic conclusion. On Friday morning I got to hear all about the "greatest game in World Series history" which I missed.

On Friday night, H and I went out in the chilly raininess to Chilis for dinner while MiL stayed with A. Upon returning, we watched "Bad Teacher" with MiL. Fortunately, she fell asleep as it was a movie with tons of vulgarity and sexuality. It was funny, though.

Had to get up early on Saturday to go to the Inquirer's Seminar at the church. Did not enjoy being up early, but enjoyed the content of the first leg of the seminar. The pastor shared the vision, mission, and goals of Perimeter and how they strive to achieve them. I must say that I am more impressed with Perimeter than any other church I have attended in the past.

After lunch with MiL at Taco Mac and seeing her on her way back to Augusta, we returned home for the rest of the day. H and I watched "Just Go With It" and it was equally as enjoyable as the previous flick while being much less crass. I really hadn't expected much of it since I am generally over Adam Sandler's predictable style and haven't enjoyed a movie with Jennifer Anniston in it since "Office Space". Was quite pleasantly surprised by the show.

After watching Stanford squeak by USC in a triple-overtime game while H updated her blog, I went to bed far too late given that we would be up early again for the 2nd leg of the seminar the next day.

The 1.5 hour session focused on the theological beliefs of Perimeter. I generally agreed with everything other than the statement "We believe man was created by God and did not evolve" (fallacy of false choice, anyone?) and a few technicalities about free will and Man's purpose (technicalities I believe can be chalked up to semantical differences more than anything).

H was not looking forward to the final session as she was worried about A being in the nursery for 3 more hours that evening. I suggested that she could go to the last portion and I would stay home with A. While one must complete all sessions in order to be considered for membership, they are all offered quarterly and I figured I could just attend the final session during the next quarter and have H feel much better with me at home with A than A in the nursery.

A was generally cranky and would not nap, making for a rough dinnertime. In the meantime, I was watching the teams I had picked sputter to a losing record for the first week this season. Annoying.

Once H got home and we got A to bed, I watched my last hope for a weekend win fade away in the Sunday Night Football match as the Eagles housed the Cowboys.

I wasn't too distraught, though. I am still way up for the year and I was looking forward to having Monday off.

Weekend was fairly uneventful and that's the way I like it.

Got up with the boy on Saturday morning so H could sleep. He let me sleep until 8, so I think that was a win.

As of last weekend, he has become quite mobile in a military sort of way. He moves around by a combination of barrel rolls and "army crawling". He is quite speedy, as well.

I followed him around as he explored the entirety of the downstairs area to make sure I was available to prevent any suicide attempts. He seemed most fascinated by the door-stop springs on the baseboards and would spend minutes at a time pulling them and listening to the satisfying "THWAAAAANG" that they produced upon release. He will now crawl clear across the room if his gaze falls to one in order to play with it.

His spatial perception and memory is showing great gains, as well. At one point, there was a package obscuring the door stop near the downstairs bathroom. When he became bored with his toys in the center of the room, he looked around, apparently remembered where the stop was even though he could not see it, crawled 20 feet across the room directly to where the stop is, moved the package, and enjoyed his reward.

He is a bit annoying with his eating habits, though. He is not a picky eater so much as he is a finicky eater. One cannot predict precisely what he will eat and not eat at any given meal. There aren't many foods at all that he has not liked at some point or another, but banana is about the only one he has never turned down on a subsequent feeding.

We visited a pumpkin patch on Saturday. He seemed largely disinterested in the ponies and rabbits and pumpkins but was fascinated by the kids jumping in the air-filled jumpers.

After the excursion, it was on to a nap for A and I watched LSU drub Auburn. Then it was on to church.

As we walked up to the nursery after the service, I could see A bouncing semi-maniacally in one of the free-standing bouncy seats with a huge grin on his face (he loves to bounce and rock and do just about anything but sit still, but he was going to town). Later, we discovered that the nursery worker had misunderstood our instructions and allowed him to eat about 3 servings worth of the little fruit puff snacks we brought. Maniacal bouncing, explained.

Saturday was in-house date night for H and I, so we had dinner and watched the last part of Sci-Fi's "Tin Man", a science-fiction reimagining of the land of Oz in the distant future relative to Dorothy's visit. Pretty good mini-series, but not as good as some of the others they have done.

Slept in on Sunday and then immersed myself in football for basically the entirety of the day. Had a pretty good day in my own football pursuits: 2-1 in fantasy football (including another win in my money league) and 4-1 in the line bets with R.G.

The Saints completely dismantled the Colts on Sunday Night Football, winning 62-7. Good way to end the night and the weekend.