What happens when...

...a two-year old gets caught between an irresistible force (Mommy at one end of the hall, getting the kids ready for bed) and an immovable object (Daddy at the other end of the hall, preventing the child from fleeing)? Judging from Rebecca's behavior, the only solution is to sit down in the middle of the hall and have a temper tantrum.

Because Amber asked me to...

Here's one of my favorite Princess Bride quotes: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That line is used in offices more frequently than I would have expected, mostly in response to some kind of new corporate term. For instance:

"initiative" really means "useless time-wasting event to make management feel better",
"employee empowerment" really means "you can choose to do your job any way you like... as long as it's like THIS",
and a "suggestion" by the corporation really means "do this or die".

I finally photographed Becca smiling

I have never seen a child look more "serious" than Becca does when we're trying to take her picture. If we catch her unawares we might capture a smile, but more often she switches to concentration mode whenever we snap the picture. Maybe it's the flash. Maybe she's just trying to figure out why we're taking pictures instead of playing with her. I don't know what it is. But we recently captured a couple pictures of Becca where she's actually smiling.

I added some new pictures to our Facebook page here. I included some new "serious" ones to illustrate how hard it is to capture a good picture of Becca. Believe me, there are lots more. But my favorite is the last one in the blue swing. It's a bit blurry because I had to take it with my camera phone while the swing was moving. Given the constraints, I think it turned out fairly well.

Pokemon

A few months ago, Kathryn got a Pokemon trading card in a Burger King kids meal. She asked me what it was and I explained the concept to her. She seemed vaguely interested so, in the interests of education, I picked up a pair of starter decks so we could learn the rules together. See I'm of the opinion that kids learn best when they're at play. This is in no way an original concept, but it dovetails nicely with my own temperment: I prefer having fun to not having fun. So if I can entertain Kathryn while enjoying myself and give her practice in reading, math, and strategy, that's something I'm going to get behind.

We'd only played one game before tonight. In order to learn the game that first time, we didn't hide any of our cards so we could discuss strategy. But tonight we each kept our cards to ourselves. I decided we'd have a nice Daddy-Daughter night out. I took Kathryn to Panera Bread for her favorite potato soup. We grabbed a big table, laid our cards out, and put our soup bowls next to the playing area. So while one person played, the other would eat. Remarkably we didn't have any unfortunate soup/card interactions. It was a delightful night!

Kathryn beat me again tonight. I think she's got a better grasp of the game than I do. She tried to comfort me on the way home, telling me that "you taught me so well that you forgot to remember the game yourself." Surely that must be the reason.

Great America

Here are some new pictures from our Great America trip. Kathryn and Becca especially enjoyed the "new" Wiggles' themed water playarea.

Becca's walking!

Finally, after many setbacks, Becca has started walking all by herself! Hurray! I wish I'd kept recording for a few more seconds though. Right after I stopped, Becca and Kathryn both fell backwards and Kathryn yelled, "Cut! Cut!"

"A meek accompanist"?

Homophonic -- A texture with a principal melody and accompanying harmony, as opposed to polyphonic.

Polyphonic -- Having two or more voices or parts, each with an independent melody, but all harmonizing.

Most Christian marriage councillors will tell us that a homophonic relationship is best in marriage, with the husband a driving melody and the wife merely accompanying harmony. I've always found something vaguely unsettling about that. The Bible says that a husband and wife are to become one. Imagined as a single body, it would seem odd then to have half of the body moving ahead while the other lags behind to support it.

I am fortunate that my wife is able to be more than merely a support for me. Instead she is my equal partner. With her I can be myself, and trust her to be herself. Together we uphold each with our complementary strengths.

"Peter -- what did you mean when you said that anybody could have the harmony if they would leave us the counterpoint?"
"Why, that I like my music polyphonic. If you think I meant anything else, you know what I meant."
"Polyphonic music takes a lot of playing. You've got to be more than a fiddler. It needs a musician."
"In this case, two fiddlers -- both musicians. I admit that Bach isn't a matter of an autocratic virtuoso and a meek accompanist. But do you want to be either? Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again."

-- Peter and Harriet, Gaudy Night

To my better half, you are my Harriet: my beloved whom I am glad to call my partner in all things. Happy anniversary, Kristin!

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Two weeks ago I went down to Wycliffe Bible Translators in West Chicago for their week-long Taste Of Translation And Linguistics course. I didn't stay the whole week, but I learned some very interesting things about Bible translation and linguistics. We had several courses on Phonetics, Language Learning (how to pick up a language through immersion), Translation, and Grammar.

I had no idea how much work went into translating the Bible for a single language group. In most cases, these language groups don't even have a written form of their language! In those cases, Wycliffe teams study the sounds and the phrases of the language and attempt to create a written language for them. This also involves demonstrating the usefulness of literacy, since it's a completely foreign concept to them. After creating a written language, Wycliffe teams study the grammar of the language and start the official "translation" process.

One of our classes involved pretending to translate Psalm 23, and we ran into some interesting problems. The instructor pointed out certain troublesome phrases, for example, "He makes me lie down in green pastures" shouldn't give the impression that the Lord is forcing the author to lie down. Also, the people group for whom we are translating might not live near any "green pastures", so we might need to use a different analogy. He cautioned us however that though it's OK to change "green pastures" into a cultural equivalent, it is not OK to change historical events. For example, even if the people group doesn't have fig trees, it's not acceptable to translate Mark 11:21 with "Rabbi, look! The mango tree you cursed has withered!"

Even though full-time missionary work isn't for me, I still enjoyed my time at Wycliffe. I met lots of great people and I learned a lot about translation. I've already used some of my new phonetics knowledge to help Rebecca pronounce some consonants. :-)

Before I left Wycliffe, I spoke with a few of their tech guys about using the computer to do some of the work remotely (mostly the grammar and translation). They admitted that they're not as far along as they'd like to be, but that they're working on it. The phonetics work and the language-learning still obviously has to be done "on-site". But the creation of the alphabet, diagramming the grammatical structure of the language, and the actual translation should be able to be done anywhere. I hope they continue to improve their infrastructure... maybe someday I'll be able to do some of the translation work from my computer here!

Prince Caspian

Kristin and I just came back from watching Prince Caspian. My recommendation: do not read the book immediately beforehand, and if you know the book very well, try to forget it before you see the movie. I learned my lesson with The Two Towers: sometimes its best to judge a movie on its own merits, instead of judging it by the book.

This is especially true of Prince Caspian, where the filmmakers radically changed the personality of one of my favorite main characters. However since I was forewarned about the change, I actually enjoyed the movie very much. The filmmakers added a few character arcs, but I thought the storyline was better for it. I cried a bit when Lucy's character arc resolves near the end of the battle sequence (you'll understand once you see it).

In my opinion, Prince Caspian is a stronger movie than LWW. But it takes a few extra liberties with the character development (especially Peter's). Try not to freak out about it. :-)

Wicked the Musical

As many of you already know, during my blog hiatus Kristin and I took a trip downtown to see Wicked right after Thanksgiving. At first I wasn't all that impressed. At the time I thought the hype had raised my expectation too high. But the next day, neither Kristin nor I could get the songs out of our mind. Two days after the performance we bought the soundtrack. And now I'm completely convinced: Wicked is a phenomenal musical!

Wikipedia summarizes the plot as follows:

Wicked tells the story of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West and her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Their friendship struggles through their opposing personalities and viewpoints, rivalry over the same love-interest, their reactions to the Wizard's corrupt government, and, ultimately, Elphaba's public fall from grace. The plot is set mostly before Dorothy's arrival from Kansas, and includes several references to well-known scenes and dialogue in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Kristin and I hadn't seen a musical since before Kathryn was born when we saw Les Miserables (unless you count the Disney's Beauty and the Beast musical we saw with Kathryn -- I don't). I normally don't like musicals, and I consider Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals particularly loathsome for some reason. Stephen Schwartz composed the music and wrote the lyrics for Wicked, and I'd never really noticed him before. After we bought the soundtrack I looked him up on-line and discovered that he'd done the music and lyrics for The Prince of Egypt as well! I'll have to seek out some of his other works like Children of Eden or Godspell.

All in all, though it took a little while for me to fully appreciate much of the music, Wicked is amazing! There are too many fantastic songs, but my favorite has to be No Good Deed (about how all of Elphaba's good intentions end badly). The songs Defying Gravity, For Good, Popular, and What Is This Feeling are all close seconds. And Dancing Through Life is amazing to watch, since the cast seems to go through four or five set or costume changes during the course of that one song! If you've seen it, leave a comment and tell me what you thought of it.

Random Musings

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to lead worship with a half-chewed Communion wafer in one's mouth?" -- me, after an unfortunate miscommunication between the pastor and those of us on the worship team.

For those of you who don't know, my dear college friend Violet Chaos has a very funny blog over at LiveJournal. She's got a great sense of humor. Over the years in which we've known each other, I've noticed that our phraseology has grown more and more similar (which is great for me; not so great for her). My personal favorite is her Lexiambicon, which is probably the safest introduction to her writings. :-)

I recently added a few pictures of our trip to the Sears Tower. We took the train down to Chicago, walked over to the Sears Tower, rode to the top, came down, walked back to the train station, and rode home. It was a long day, but Kathryn really wanted to go to the top of the Sears Tower. There's also one older picture of the girls cuddling together on the couch.

And here's a cute video of Rebecca. I was testing my new camera, and I couldn't get the camera down low enough to take a decent video of Rebecca crawling. So I inadvisedly put the camera on the floor...

I'm back

Now that several friends have started blogs of their own, I've got the itch to update mine a bit. It's been almost exactly one year since I posted anything here... I barely remember how this thing works!

So I'll start slowly. I posted some pictures on my Facebook page so you can see how much the kids have grown in the last year.

The first set is from our Cooking Night. Kathryn and I made our Shepherd's Pie together while Becca played on the toy horse.

The second set is from Kathryn's last swimming class. It's amazing how far she's come in eight weeks. Originally she wouldn't even lower herself into the pool. But now, though she's still scared, at least she overcomes her fear and swims anyway. I was a little concerned myself when on the first day of class the instructor put Kathryn and the rest of the Level 1 swimmers at the deep end (12 feet), while the other swimmers stayed at four feet! The instructor pointed out that kids learn better when they have absolutely no chance of touching the bottom. I was not relieved, but at least I understood her rationale. I attended the first class and the last class. Kathryn was so terrified during her first class that it took all my willpower not to run in and "save" her. We decided that it was best if I just stayed away for the rest of the classes. So I didn't come back until her last class so she could show me what she'd learned. :-)