Fail. Fail. Win. Mother’s Day 2013

Ahh, Mother’s Day…

The day when all your good intentions for and love toward the lovely mother of your children meet the challenges to ‘shock and awe’ your bride while maintaining the element of surprise.  Yeah, I’m toast.

So initially I was trying to go big or go home.  I hate to admit it, but I probably have some self-centered complex that drives me to try to blow my recipient away with a jaw dropping gift, not so much for their joy as much as for my praise and admiration. It’s a disease, I know. I’m working on it, I promise.

So anyway. About a week ago, I saw that tickets to Josh Groban were going to go on sale.  Jen has had “See Josh Groban in concert” on her bucket list for a few years and because I want to be her castle protecting, dragon slaying, knight in shining armor, I have tried to make this happen for quite some time.  I was so giddy that, with complete and utter abandonment of clear and logical thinking, I quickly sent a Facebook message to our neighbor who has connections at the Palace (the place Groban would be singing at in October) and asked him if he could get me a ticket or two for Jen but that he had to keep it a super duper top secret surprise so I could pull it off with Jen knowing.

Yeah. Jen and I have a shared Facebook page.

How have I held down a job all these years, practiced personal hygiene or driven a car with such ridiculous lack of forethought like this?

Anyway, you can probably guess what transpired. My faithful and kind neighbor promptly responded and, because I’m at work, Jen saw the message pop up in her email (on the iPhone I got her so she could stay connected while the kids were using the computers for school! [idiot!]).  She kindly reminded me, as she held back giggles, that it might be best not to use Facebook messaging to try to plan surprises for her in the future.

Fail.

Alright, one strike on the batter and here comes Dare back up to the plate to try again.  I remembered that she mentioned she wouldn’t mind having a tablet to do some reading on as she’s really enjoyed some Kindle books recently, but reading them on her tiny phone has been a challenge.  Well, a few days later, I saw a Mother’s Day discount for a Kindle and I started to check it out.  I could get a really nice HD Fire with a camera for a good price, so I went for it.  Now this time, I was not to be found out.  So I called her immediately and asked her to please steer clear from Amazon emails for a while and to let the kids get any packages that may come to the door in the next few days.  Then it happened.  An email came with the subject line “Your KINDLE FIRE HAS SHIPPED!”  Yeah, she saw it.

Fail.

So today has come and gone.  I ran out to the store last night to get some cooking supplies, slipped out of bed quietly this morning, encouraging Jen to take her time, and started making breakfast. The girls begged me to get them up so they could help and I did get Naomi up after a bit, so she could help me with the omelets, hash browns and English muffins.  Breakfast went off without any major malfunctions. Mostly because I remembered to pull the batteries from the smoke detectors.  Hang on a second…

Alright. Batteries are now re-connected. Whew!

After Jen ate some breakfast, she started opening her gifts.  She said the food was great.  She was probably just being nice, since she didn’t have to cook.  First gift was a Detroit Tiger’s visor, for the game we’re all going to on Wednesday.  Next was a popcorn maker.  Then a croquet set and we topped it all off with the Kindle Fire.  Even though she knew about the Kindle, the kids were pretty shocked and awed.  She had mentioned how much she would love to have a croquet set when we played last weekend at her sister’s house.  She is so good to us by making popcorn for our weekly AFV family night but she has to stand over the stove and shake the big pot back and forth so we got her one that she could dump kernels and butter in and walk away.  She doesn’t really like wearing hats, but I was so convinced she would look absolutely adorable in this visor, that I had to buy it for her.  This girl can rock some Tiger Orange.

And the Kindle?  Oh yeah, she was reading/playing with that thing all day.

She picked Arby’s for lunch and we grilled some burgers and fries for dinner. The kiddos set the table and cleaned up after each meal and Naomi was my right hand woman in the kitchen, cutting vegetables, making desserts and providing moral support to her stressed out Dad unable to cope with the demands of meal preparation (so much timing to get it on the table hot!).

ALL joking aside, I have to say that I do not know how in the world my wife does this every day. I know she doesn’t do everything we did today, every day. But she does it very often and often does even MORE.  I am so exhausted from one day. I clearly have no idea how good we have it.  And the kids?  Yeah, they’re brats. 

Overall, I think it was a win. But you’ll have to ask Jen to make sure. We just hope that she truly knows and feels how much we love her, appreciate her and could not do without her around this madhouse.

Happy Mother’s Day, Jen!

paul(and kids)

Throw Back

Remember this game?!

http://nny.com/snowcraft/play/

Small Group

We love our small group…

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This past Sunday was a great small group meeting.  We met and talked about the good news that Jesus gives us the two exact things that we need;

1. Forgiveness – From our sin.

2. Righteousness – So we can stand before God.

We celebrated a birthday, made Tinkerbell fly, flipped some kids in the hammock, played some music on the leather chairs and then launched a crazy game of ceiling fan balloon dodge game (or something like that).

Thank you to our host family and for everyone who came, shared and interacted around the amazing love of our Savior.  Look forward to doing it again in April!

-The Dares

New Family Photo

It just touches my heart when I get to spend some quality time with the kids (even when they won’t let me come outside with them…it’s still just nice to be able to look on them and know they are having fun) – Paul

Props to Canton, MI Public Library!

You rock, Canton, MI. Here’s why. I’ve been to the megaplex Southfield library, the William Faust Westland library and the very nice Plymouth library and all of them barely have a selection of actual Christian literature.  They may each have a “Spiritual” or “Inspirational” section, but even those sections have an anemic selection of actual Christian literature.  Now, before you think I’m a self-centered naive Christian who thinks that public institutions should serve my interests, hear me out.  I’m not saying that public libraries, funded by tax payer dollars, must have my books.  What I am saying is that if tax payers are funding great institutions like libraries, then the literature in them should represent the culture around them.  I’m fine with all the new-age spirituality, romance novels and secular humanism packed on the shelves.  All I’m saying is give the Christian genre equal shelf space.  And Canton does it!  There is at least one huge aisle packed with great Christian literature both old and new.  You do have to weed through the good, bad and ugly, but there is actual good.  Sadly, this is not what I’ve found at the other libraries in our area.

So, thank you Canton Public Library.  Keep up the good work and I’ll keep my late fines coming your way. 

-paul

Looking back over 2012

“I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord, because of all that the Lord has done for us”  Isaiah 63:7 (RSV)

The Lord was good to us in 2012.  We were all healthy, I stayed employed,   our kids kept up with their studies, one of them jumped into the public school system for the first time.  We camped as a family for the first time in the summer.  Our oldest daughter let some girl at the mall poke holes in her ears.  We welcomed a teenager into our family.  We donated our first car and the Lord provided a new one from some missionaries who needed to get rid of theirs so they could get back to the field.  We saw some amazing things happen in the lives of friends and families.  We watched God “raise” a one year old named Truman, from the dead.  Naomi exploded in her piano playing and Anna joined her in taking lessons.  I took a trip to Rochester, NY and Atlanta, GA for work and was protected the entire way.  My sister’s husband returned safely from Afghanistan.  Our Pastor finished an outstanding preaching series on the book of Acts.  The company I worked for (Global Crossing) was purchased by a similar company named Level 3 Communications.  We started geocaching.  Paul got a raging case of poison ivy and had my first experience with oral steroids ( ).  The Pretty Painter launched her online gallery and sold her first painting.    Our dryer broke twice and we were able to fix it instead of having to replace it twice!  I was able to preach a few times at our church.  I also was able to help with “Take your Kids to Work Day” for the first time.  We got to see Jen’s extended family at the Shepherd family reunion.  Jen got a grain mill and starting making the best food in the world with freshly, home-ground wheat and flour.  Jen did a ton of work on our budget and was the most incredibly supportive wife and mother a husband could ever ask for.

I greatly look forward to what God will start, continue and finish in 2013.

“The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes.”  – Psalm 118:23

 

Paul

Make your own Tabernacle model

So…last year at church we taught through the glories of Old Testament Tabernacle and built some visual aides along the way.  A year or so ago, I picked a cheap cardboard model up at Family Christian and have been putting it together progressively through each lesson on Wednesday nights.

But I really wanted some visuals that the kids could touch, handle and really get a feel for.  I shopped everywhere, but it was either too hard to find anything or what I did come across was way too expensive (like HERE).  I even offered to write some product reviews for some discounted prices, but no takers.  Oh well.  So, I decided to start trying to make my own miniature model of the Tabernacle and this is what I’ve got -

I have to give a huge thank you to my boys for their generosity and support by offering (no pun intended) up many of their Legos to me for this project.

So, the first item the worshiper sees in the Tab is the bronze altar of sacrifice:

This is the bucket to a toy catapult, some rods from a Bionicle set and some broken off tubes to hold the rods

I used a lot of super glue (my wife would be proud).  I broke off and filed down some tube sections flat  and super-glued them to the side of the upside down catapult part.  I then slid the plastic rods through the tubes.  These are the carrying poles used to transport the altar through the dessert by the Israelites as they headed from Mt. Sinai to the promised land of Canaan.

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I then found another Lego piece that perfectly fit inside the altar to form the grate on which the animal was laid.  I started out with some small horns, but no matter how much we searched we just couldn’t come up with that fourth horn so we changed to bigger horns.  I had to cut out some of the gray piece’s corners to fit the larger horns and glue them in.  I added (again) Lego flames and viola, a bronze altar!

I used some of Jen’s vivid red nail polish to create the sacrificial lamb:

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I’ll post more pictures for the other parts when I get a minute.  -paul