ok, here i go...

ok, so the pressure of putting something on the family blog has taken me over the edge, and i am finally taking the plunge....many of the bloggers in our circle are men, except for my girl, Linda, who is a brave lady and i come with courage drawn from hers....and knowing that many-a-chicks are blogging without fear, like my girl Kate.....so thank you, for being strong and treading waters that in my world, men have been dominating (good thing womens liberation wasn't up to me, we would be REALLY unfairly treated if it was). So, I can't promise to be witty (although i will try) or to have any deep revelations about life or to even have anything interesting, in fact I guarantee that i won't - but my theory about blogging is that we aren't really looking for that when we read other peoples blogs, we really just want a peek into each others lives in an honest and creative venue...what a perfect "spot" for that, this blog.....I am the first one to say that people watching is the GREATEST pass-time....I used to intentionally block out time at the mall for the activity, and i think that blogging is the mall-watching of our generation....if it was people watching at the mall in the 80's, its blogging in the 00's....is that sort of twisted????

shoe fetish

Ellie is angry, not so much when she's awake, but when she goes to sleep (it's a mcguire gene i think) :)

the other night she had fallen asleep with me on the couch, and she had her new sandals on that she's going to wear when the girls go to FL, she had been wearing them ALL DAY. So i take her to her bed, put her in and gently remove her sandals, knowing that if she senses me taking them off it's OVER (she's got a shoe-fetish already, again a mcguire gene. Her aunt jenny even works for Nike... crazy mcguires)

So i get the shoes off successfully and think i'm in the clear when she starts up, and yells, "give it back to me! give it back to me!" not sure what to do, because i have NO hopes that i could actually put the shoes back on without making her totally awake, i sit there with my eyes darting around the room for possible options. She's still yelling "give it back to me!" with her eyes half closed so i decide to hand her one shoe. "Maybe holding them will assuage her majesty's anger?" i think.

So then she takes the shoe in between her two hands, almost cradling it, she puts it up to her mouth and makes two loud sucking noises... "what the h---?" i'm thinking?

Then she shakes a little and pulls it away from her mouth and says, "eeeaaaaahhhh! why'd you do that?!?"

by now i'm lost, no idea what has just happened, then it dawns on me, "she thought i was giving her her sippie cup" I look at the shoe and the back side of it is totally wet from where she put it in her mouth and tried to draw some water out of it. "Oh great!" I think, "i've just taken this shoe fetish thing to a whole new level!" I look back at her and she's sleeping again...

hopefully she'll forget this ever happened!

update-who does she look like?

aria is 7+weeks old. She's into smiling and "talking". Her hair is mostly fallen out and starting to come back in, seems like the perfect opportunity to do another side by side, her to ellie, same ages... any new insights? any change of opinion? (aria is top ellie is below)

she's a big kid

it has been in the works for quite some time now...

the amazing vocabulary
the adult-like phrasing (responding to a question with "actually...")
the developing preferences that are expressed quite vocally and adamantly
the changing face, the long, thin, mostly-graceful limbs

ellie is becoming a big kid, joc and i both realized it was coming...

but the scales have been tipped, she is DEFINITELY a big kid now...why? (don't get too excited the diapers haven't exactly come off yet)

because she has now come to embrace that essence of big-kidness. Namely that when a camera is pointed in her direction, it is an opportunity to make an obnoxiously goofy face. Goodbye to all those sweet candid shots of toddlerhood. Maybe she'll recover by her wedding day.

always learning

so the walmart post (below) apparently struck a nerve in all of us. For the record, bob and I have talked it over just between the two of us to try to further understand each other's point of view and to apologize where offense was given. That was an important lesson, some discussions are better handled in private rather than in a semi-public forum like this.

but the other major learning i had is how strongly personal and moral convictions can lurk behind a simple opinion on something that is otherwise trite.

My original post on walmart was intended to be funny. I guess i do have a concern about a walmart monopoly, their scale as a company is massive, their influence tremendous... any company with that kind of power frightens me. But mostly i was going for humor... the chaos, the crazy walmart shoppers in search for bargains, the long lines... i know we've all been there and was trying to capitalize on that shared experience for some lighthearted humor. so where did it go wrong?

This got frighteningly serious because of all the aforementioned underlying convictions that i didn't take into account. On my part, they are concerns about capitalism as an immoral economic system, consumer accountability for what they support with their $, american materialism which is stronger than ever and destroying so many families who are under huge debt-loads yet still trying to get more, the funneling of money out of local communities to the wealthy people "at the top" and even the disdain for the way that so many organizations manipulate our allegiance to Christ by trying to make us believe that if we spend, or vote, or even watch their stuff that we are then being "good Christians" (when in fact their motives are selfish, using our faith for their personal gain)

my good friend bob, he's got strong feelings about "class-warfare" that happens so frequently in america. For the way the lower-classes are dehumanized and looked down upon. He (along with one of our anonymous post-ers) has concerns about the "forgotten" of society, the developmentally disabled, the elderly. Noble convictions.

the rest of you who posted or at least thought about doing so also have your convictions that run deeply and come bubbling up in issues like this. AND I DIDN'T TAKE THESE THINGS INTO ACCOUNT WHEN I WROTE THIS ENTRY. Nor did i understand them for what they were when they were articulated. I assumed my convictions were most important and obvious.

Responsible communication doesn't rely on words alone but must take into account what is being said indirectly, what is being heard also. So often we refuse to take responsibility for the underlying messages we convey. How many times in arguing with a sibling, parent, or spouse have we said, "that's not what i said!" when in fact, that's true, you didn't say it, but it was exactly what you meant. Or how many times have we refused to take accountability for what was heard by someone else because it wasn't what we intended to say.

I guess i've learned (and re-learned) a lot here and wanted to share it.
1. work to understand and respect the convictions that undergird someone's communication--including your own.
2. take responsibility for what you say and how it's heard. if you're not being heard in the way you intended try a different way to communicate. Don't restate the same thing in the same way and expect a different result-that's just insanity (and could be a friendship breaker)!
3. be humble. try to be understood and to understand MORE than trying to be right.
4. know when to shut up. agreeing to disagree is a skill we all need to learn. I know i do. I should've shut up much sooner in all of this and left it where it was but i've got this deep need to win people over to my side. that's a dangerous tendency sometimes.
5. (as mentioned above) learn what belongs in public and what belongs in private. Draw the line where needed and pursue a different avenue for the sake of unity.

I admit fault for the way i handled this debate after the original post and for oversimplifying something as complex as human emotion and personal convictions. But God is good and allowed this to be a learning experience for me. Hopefully it was for you too.

sorry for offense i've given. Thanks for reading :)

the future is tacky

[EDIT: please read the post always learning in conjunction with this one. Some of the stuff said here and in the comments after is inappropriate and/or handled poorly. this is left as a lasting memorial of what you might NOT want to do.

had some lunch with friends yesterday afternoon. For some reason the conversation turned toward WAL-MART

that's never a good thing, in my opinion. Because Walmart is the scourge of the planet.

I openly expressed my dislike for the big blue and white superstore of tacky and I think they might have been offended slightly. Because next thing I knew, we were debating the pros/cons of walmart (guess which side i was on?)... in the middle of that one of the friends told me i should write a post on it. I guess this isn't something I could post on my church website. We'd become the "church that hates walmart"... i can just see it in the paper, right there next to pat robertson's wicked comments about ariel sharon, and TV networks, and all the other stuff pat robertson hates.

So i've been thinking about this for the last 12 hours or so. Is my hate for walmart justified? Or does it well-up out of my tendency to exaggerate and ruffle feathers. After serious reflection I'm convinced that yeah, my hate for walmart is genuine AND justified. Here's why...

1. going there is a nightmare of an experience.
stuff all over in the aisles. dodging stray carts rolling around all over the parking lot. fighting off all those aggressive walmart die-hards who will run you and your kids over to get the last $12 dvd player that they've been plotting to get since combing over the bulk-mail ads the entire week previous. Oh and then the checkout lines... they are always SO long, but they have 100 of them that always remained closed--if you ask me it's a deliberate form of humiliation "we could open more lines but we WON'T" Its the stuff of brainwashing, driving your self-worth so low that you start to believe that you DESERVE to stand in these ridiculously long lines. All part of their strategy to take over the world.

2. stuff you've never heard of.
so while i'm getting run over by the crazy lady diving in the aisles after the last $12 dvd player, i look at the box she's now tucking under her coat like some football at risk of getting stripped from her hands. "QUANTAXX"? What it the world is that? I look again... yup! QUANTAXX is the brand she's buying! I don't believe in brand loyalty, but really where did this thing come from?? My hunch is this, that they've got some sweatshop down in arkansas of poor preschool children that they are forcing to assemble consumer electronics... since all the kids is this sweatshop are deprived of nutrition and education, they scrawl out the few letters they've been allowed to learn on the press that makes the labels for the DVD players and Ta-da! you've just created QUANTAXX!

QUANTAXX-are they a reliable company? YOU'LL never know! are they semi-moral in their business practices? Human Rights Watch has never heard of them! Will it be compatible with my existing home-electronics equipment? not sure, but if not, power-converters are on a "roll back" in aisle 437.

3. their pricing strategies are a little dirty... and geared toward world domination.
pricing stuff at or below cost to "draw you in" to their head-spinning land of discount chaos, they undercut any respectable retailer. I don't think the government should intervene here or anything, but i think consumers should think more about it. when you buy something at walmart you are making a decision for the future of the world... will i help the world become a cheaper-and simultaneously a TACKIER place? Or will i fork out the extra $1.75 for the dustbuster and make an investment to keep the world on a slightly classier plane?

Every time someone buys something at walmart, realize what is being done, you are rewarding them and penalizing another... more than that with every purchase you are making our world "wal-mart-ier" keep it up and pretty soon the whole planet will be a big blue and white catastrophe. Is that what you want???

The next time you are in dire need of paper towels or that new Will Ferrell movie, think these things over, think about the world you'd like to leave for your kids and your grandkids... then bite the bullet, and pay a little more for the investment in the future of mankind.

want more blogging? you might be interested

i haven't blogged on this for a while. We've been sick and time has been short. I just wanted you to know that I also have a blog that i write on more philosophical/ spiritual matters. Check it out, especially if you are angry at the lack of content here, but never fear, we'll have more here soon (especially as soon as i can motivate my jocelyn to step out into the blogosphere)