You Said It!

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life.  I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have --- life itself.          

--Walter Anderson  

Clair's sister says, 

"He has basically lost the use of all body parts.

  He can still feed himself, but barely,  

He cannot even turn over in bed by himself. 

 But he always has a smile for everyone."

"Sometimes it is the very things we despise about our lives

 and try to 'wish away'

that God is using to show Himself strong."

"There are two ways to live your life.

  One is as though nothing is a miracle.

  The other is as though everything is a miracle."

"Love is that condition in which

 the happiness of another person

 is essential to your own."

"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; 

they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

"I've got nothing to do today but smile."

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness

 and just be happy."

"Being happy isn't about having everything in your life perfect. 

 Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things."

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, 

but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

Buddy Walk pictures courtesy of S&A Photography

Self-Discovery

Wade:  Randall, let's play hide 'n seek.

Randall:  No, I want to read now.

Wade:  Play hide 'n seek!  I hide!

Randall:  Okay, you go hide and then find yourself.

Wade:  Yes!  I will find me!  (happily goes off in search of himself)

Collection of Oddities

Everyone in the world is quite mad, except for me and thee.  

And sometimes I have my doubts about thee.

Computer science has become a culinary art.

We hold these truths to be self-evident...that a father who would bake a laptop,

would have children who will blend Superman, Mardi Gras, and Lei Day...

 clear the table with a one-horse team...

 and bring in the clothes by donning gay apparel when it's not the season to be jolly.

Fa, la, la, la, la!

That's what I think...

"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit.

"No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't.  But there was going to be when I began it.  It's just that something happened to it along the way."

Practice Makes...Better

I like the discipline that piano lessons teach Wade.  Many processes are going on simultaneously when he is reading notes and translating that information into isolating the proper fingers on the right keys, while, at the same time, trying to count the rhythm.

Here are two videos taken about a week apart.  It's encouraging to see progress in his ability to focus on a difficult task with only minimal prompting.

He loves music and the piano, but sometimes he tries to shut down if a new concept seems to be too hard.  It takes some perseverance to help him learn and then to sit beside him daily making him focus until the end of the song.  But it really doesn't take long each day to do and learning new skills gives him the confidence that will be the springboard to perfecting further skills, both musically and otherwise.  There is, after all, something to be said for the (significantly modified) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

And this week for the first time, he chose to sit down at the piano during his free time, and he played all four of his newest songs completely by himself without taking a break.

In the first video he is counting aloud:  ta for the quarter notes, ta-ah for the half notes, ta-ah-ah-ah for the whole notes, shuh for the quarter rests, shuh-uh for half rests, shuh-uh-uh-uh for the whole rests.

In the second one he is trying to sing the words while keeping the rhythm.  It isn't perfect, but it is one step in that direction!

Ha Pe Thursday

Enough laughing.  Back to work.

Indians Are People Too

Our oldest son, Randall, had a story in his reading book today that spotlighted a part of our nation's history which no one is proud to remember.

It reveals a sordid truth about us, however, that must be remembered, painful though it may be.

At the time of the story, in 1879, an Indian was not considered to be a person.

Driven away from their homes in Nebraska, the Ponca Indians fared poorly in the harsh wilderness of Oklahoma with scant provisions for settlement.  Many of them died, including a child of Standing Bear, a Ponca chief.

Wishing to bury his son on ancient burial grounds, Standing Bear made the long trek back to Nebraska only to be arrested upon his arrival.

In the trial that ensued, Standing Bear made an eloquent plea for the recognition of his people:

[My] hand is not the same color as yours, but if I prick it, the blood will flow, and I shall feel pain.  The blood is of the same color as yours.  God made me and I am a man.

Today, it is hard to imagine basing the definition of humanity solely on the color of someone's skin.  "How dreadful!" we say.  "How monstrous! How uncivilized!"

And yet today.....

....it is deemed to be the right of the parent to decide that a baby is not a person because he has an extra chromosome.

I seem to be hearing echoes of the power-hungry pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm:  "We are all created equal, but some of us are more equal than others."

Or maybe I'm hearing the diatribe of the book-burning Fire Chief in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:  "We must all be alike.  Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.  Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."

You may dismiss those as mere stories or as wildly improbable tales of science fiction.  But we cannot dismiss the truth of our past:  at one time we destroyed other human beings simply because they were brown.

Are we regressing into the self-justification that allowed such atrocities?  Will we soon want to seek and destroy those who are autistic, deaf, dyslexic, elderly, red-headed, or sports-impaired?

Have we come so far in 130 years only to be doomed to repeat our mistakes?

Think about it.