On July 27, 2004, I made the following note into Pocket Outlook on my Pocket PC:

Joshua Thomas- born 1552 in the middle of a thunderstorm. 8 lbs 1.2 oz, 20 inches long.

I was working the swing shift at the time. I took my wife to a routine OB/GYN appointment around 9 AM that morning. I planned to take her home, eat lunch, then go to work. Joshua’s due date was Aug 11. My wife hadn’t packed anything. In fact, neither of us had clothes for another day because laundry was going to be done after the appointment. Her blood pressure was slightly high, so we were told to go to the hospital. The hospital concurred and suggested inducing. Then they brought in an ultra-sound and said that Joshua’s shoulders were too big and needed to be delivered by C-section. I’ve since learned that New Jersey has the highest rate of C-sections in the nation and doctors won’t chance anything here. Somewhere around 2:30, the room filled up with doctors and nurses and it seemed like equipment was flying all over the place. My mother-in-law had arrived for support. While Christina was being prepped for surgery, the power went out. She freaked. I figured the hospital had a backup generator, but the power was out for a lot longer than a generator *should* need to kick in. Especially in hospitals, those things should have millisecond tolerances.

Christina was taken back to surgery while my mother in law and I were left in the labor and delivery room. I was fetched to come back to surgery. I didn’t see Joshua taken out. The next year, I watched as Caleb was taken out, but I didn’t get to see as much with Joshua. He came out with a full set of lungs, really ticked off at being removed from his safe warm place. After cleaning him up, I followed him to the nursery, then bounced back and forth between the nursery and my mother-in-law until Christina was wheeled out of surgery into a room. When the doctors felt she was ready, I went down the hall to get Joshua from the nursery. After Christina’s dad and sister arrived, her sister and I drove back to my house to do laundry and pack several days of clothes for Christina. As I said, Joshua was born during a thunderstorm. Several roads were still closed due to flooding and damage while I drove home. We missed it all.

Ultrasound- Dec 24, 2003

Walking down the hall, Jul 27, 2004 

July 27, 2004

 

Pictures from July 2008

 

Happy 4th birthday, Joshua!

Since Windows Live Spaces only allows me to put a blog entry under one category, I have no idea whether this one belongs under my "Marriage and Family Issues" or "Bible and Church" category. I guess I'll drop it under family.

My wife's cousin had a graduation party yesterday. Nobody told me about it until we got home from church. Our church is having VBS (Vacation Bible School) this week and as part of VBS, we always bring in an adult speaker. Teens from another church come to run the children's classes and nursery so that our adults and teens can sit through the sessions, then our teens will travel to another church to do the same later this summer. We have one of our favorite speakers this year, Dr. Patrick Mead. He's doing a series this year on "Re-imagining the church", and it's very enlightening. Somehow we interpretted the command "Go into all the world...." to mean "Put up buildings and invite people to them, then wonder why they rarely show up." Granted, we need buildings for various reasons. They are highly useful, but the building is not the church; the body of believers is. Patrick Mead made a comment I may adopt: "I believe in air conditioning; it's one of the tenents of my faith." Anyway, if you're interested, keep watching our website. You should be able to listen to the lessons once they're posted.

That aside, we got back to my in-laws' house after 11 AM from church. We've been staying there on weekends, and we had an open house yesterday, so not being in our house was a good idea. We had to be back at church by 6 PM for the evening session. I found out upon return to my in-laws' house that we had a graduation party to go to at 2 PM, from which we would leave to go to church. There went my afternoon.

I got to thinking about it though. We had a busy day. Going to this party would make it even busier. We did go, of course. However, the family throwing the party hasn't had time to come to one of our parties. We've invited them to several, but they always have something else to do no matter how much advance notice we send out. While we were at the party, I noticed that many other members of the family weren't there, and most of those members never show up for parties. I thought of all the people from church that we've invited to parties, and most always have something else to do.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. I've studied time management for years. Hyrum Smith says that telling somebody "I don't have time for this" is lying. When you say "I don't have time" what you really mean is "I value another event during that time more." Time management is a value judgement, and I can respect that, but it can be hard not to take it personally when the same people always value another event more during the same time period as an event that you have invited them to share the time with you.

At one point, I was tempted to start refusing (or kindly ask my wife, who runs the social calendar) if we could stop going to events from people who never find ours important enough to come to. I haven't though. There are worse things in the world to be known as than "the family who values spending time with other family when invited."

What is a “Why Train?” If you have toddlers, you no doubt have experienced this phenomenon. It all starts with a question. No matter what answer is given, the next question is “Why?” That answer generates another ""Why?", and it continues on down the line until God Himself would run out of explanations besides "That's the way I wanted it," to which the toddler would respond with yet another "Why?"

I've told my children they are an epistemological nightmare. While cleaning out my car in Buffalo on Sunday, Caleb saw an item in the box and asked "Why is it a Jelly Bean?" I'm an engineer, and went through the list of qualities that make the item that he saw a Jelly Bean. He followed with "Why?"

All that aside, I just went through one of the more amusing "Why Trains." I have my desktop computer set to a pictures screensaver. I can occasionally buy myself a few minutes to work on my laptop if I put "the pictures" on for the kids. Joshua followed me upstairs and the screen saver had already activated. He started pointing out events in the pictures. I tried to say I was trying to read something. Then he got really excited as a picture of my wife in her bridal dress flanked by her youngest sister and cousin as bridesmaids appeared. He said "Look! Mommy getting married!" Without looking up I replied "I know, Joshua. I was there."

He asked "Why?"

I said "Because I married her."

He asked "Why?"

My mind went into a terminal reset mode as I started wanting to answer honestly while realizing that there was little I could say at this point that he would understand. The only thing left to do was bust out laughing. Seriously, get asked by a toddler why you married your wife when you're off guard and see how you react.

I spent Monday night in a hotel in Portsmouth, VA. I turned on the Discovery Channel at 10 and watched Verminators. I've really started to enjoy that show for some reason; perhaps for the educational aspect. I hated reality TV when it focused on Survivor, but I really enjoy reality TV in the context of The Apprentice, Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Verminators, etc.

The point I hoped to make in this entry is that the owner, Mike, went to visit a client. The client was the friend of a woman who was not in the apartment, but had accumulated a ton of clutter. This woman had so much junk in her apartment that an entire bathroom, including the tub, was full. The problem is all that clutter caused her a vermin problem, like cockroaches and some kind of carpet bug. The only room in the entire house that could be treated was the kitchen.

The friend made a comment about the clutter "It's all worth a million dollars to her." Where do we (I count myself in here) get the idea that all this junk that we bring into our houses is or will be worth millions of dollars someday? Most of the stuff we bring in is little more than trash.

There are two kinds of energy, as any grade school science student can tell you: kinetic and potential. I'm sure this can be applied to finances: there is kinetic value and potential value. The thing is, potential value is only useful when converted to kinetic value. If you happen to have a 1987 McDonald's happy meal toy that you believe might be worth a million dollars, it's absolutely worthless just sitting in your house collecting dust. Chance are, the way that you're storing it is costing you to lose any value that the darn thing may have had, if any.

Consider this as well: an item's value is determined only by what somebody is willing to pay for it. I'm having a huge problem with that right now. I'm trying to sell my house, but at the moment, nobody seems to think my house is worth what we have to price it at just to break even on the balance of our mortgage plus closing costs.

Just throw the darn junk away. Get rid of it. It's costing you energy and storage space. Just get rid of it. If you believe that you may have something worth money, contact a collector. Just because you find it worth a million dollars doesn't mean I'd give you a quarter for it. Obviously, this rant/post applies to me as well. My ATI video card driver disks for some old card that I used on a Windows 98 system will never be worth money, and are only taking up space. I'm not likely to ever need to use them again.

I recently came across this book review about a biography of A. W. Tozer. I didn't know very much about Tozer. I know he  was a preacher and evangelist and wrote many books. I've read a lot of quotes from him in other writings. Apparently he was some kind of spiritual giant. I've heard a lot of recommendations for his books, but I've also heard comments that his books can make you feel like he's beating you up for failing to live up to a very high standard.

The book review pointed out something interesting. He did not have much at all if any relationship with his wife and many of his children. He apparently had enough of a relationship to have several children, but his devotional and travel schedule left little room for his family. That troubles me. I obviously would love to be some kind of "super saint", walking hand in hand with God. I would love to spend the time reading and learning. I do the best I can, but what kind of testimony would I have if I neglected my job and my family?

I've heard that Martin Luther took to family life with a passion after a life as a monk. He truly enjoyed domestic life, and I've heard a quote from him that "a housewife washing diapers is more pleasing to God than a monk going through his prayers." On one level, devotion and worship to God are highly important, but on another, should they eclipse everything? No doubt, I should probably choose reading the Bible or a worthy book over watching Grey's Anatomy, but should I choose spending 4 hours in my closet praying over spending time with my boys, building a relationship and trying to demonstrate to them how to relate to the world as a Christian? I honestly never understood how people can pray that long. Should I spend my evenings reading theological works rather than try to take some of the load of raising the children off of my wife?

No doubt, these questions may seem easy on the surface, while they may go deep in exploration. We can find extremes in both directions. For a Christian, isn't living out faith in the day to day actions of our lives at least as important as outward demonstrations of piety?

Tonight, I feel pretty good. I started this week on a very low note, as you can tell from my Mother's Day entry. I thought about deleting it, but I try not to delete my writings. I'm hardly an author, but committing my thoughts to paper or cyberspace almost seems to be a snapshot in time of what I was thinking or facing at a particular moment. Losing my composure on a blog, while I'm not sure I want to face later, is still part of my past. That's how I see it, anyway.

I went on Weight Watchers on Monday. I found out that they have an online program for men. My wife joined a few weeks ago, but she goes to Saturday meetings. I decided that since I am a computer geek anyway, and I don't want to have to coordinate who's going to take care of the kids when plus my travel schedule around meetings, I'd just go online. I started Monday afternoon. I made it through dinner and into Tuesday, when I went through that phase where gnawing my desk sounded like a good idea. I made it through Tuesday and into Wednesday, when we went to dinner at church. I'm not aware of many evangelical type churches that are friendly to dieters. We've tried to do Atkins in the past, and we know this very well. I basically ate reasonable and smaller portions than I normally would have.

Wednesday brought some challenges. I've written on this and my Blogger blog about the challenges we're facing with selling our house. We reached a point with our previous Realtor of wanting to fire her. She wasn't very responsive and she wasn't getting people in the door. I got her broker involved twice. I deleted two blog entries from this blog, normally against my policy, but they were probably less than kind. The second time I called her broker, I had a 20 minute call with the Realtor, when I thought we resolved some communications issues and got back on track. After that, I started asking her what we have to do to get people in the house. She came back with the suggestion to do a short sale. I did some brief checking, and came back with "No way. A short sale is not possible." After that, she referred me to a mortgage broker and suggested we refinance.

We went back and forth, and she said she would let us out of our listing agreement to refinance. I asked in an email for an unconditional release. She came back and said that our listing agreement was null and void. Still needing to sell our house, we turned to a Realtor who is a professional contact of a good friend of ours. She was uncertain of our listing agreement release, so I called our previous Realtor to ask again for the unconditional release. I informed her that we can't refinance; we need to get our house sold and if she can't do it, we have to turn to a Realtor who can. She told us that was fine with her and wished us the best. The Realtor we listed with did a phenomenal job. She did more for us in the first 24 hours than the first Realtor had done in two months. She worked hard to get our house marketed. Her broker came to visit the house, as did several other Realtors from her brokerage. This had not been done by anyone from our first Realtor's brokerage. It took her 30 days to print flyers for us, and took two days to get her sign and lockbox after letting us out of the agreement.

I got a call Wednesday afternoon while I was in the middle of my Weight Watchers-friendly lunch. It was the broker from the first Realtor, and she was fuming mad that we had listed with another agent. Apparently the first Realtor had been fired and left a huge mess behind, although I have no details. She said that our listing was only dropped to refinance. This woman would not shut up for two seconds to let me talk. I had to keep asking her to let me finish a sentence. I got spun up so fast I was shouting, and I had to leave the cubicle farm I work in to the hallway because I was shouting so loud and I figured the rest of the building deserved a chance to hear. Not really, but I needed to leave so I didn't bother other people. I argued with her for several minutes. At one point, I got so mad I blurted out "This is why everybody hates Realtors!", a comment I had to spend time apologizing for. I told her that I asked for an unconditional release and she had a copy of that email. I told her that I told the Realtor that let us go from our listing that I intended to list with an agent who was willing to work, and she said that was OK. This broker through in a bunch of legalese and basically gave me the choice: sit out the rest of the listing agreement inactive (which is about the standard of service her agent had given us) or be assigned to another Realtor in her office. She had already called my new Realtor and demanded the listing be taken down.

I called the new Realtor, who has put a lot more work into selling our house than the first Realtor/brokerage. She has worked hard for us. I went back and forth between the two, feeling trapped. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a Realtor, nor do I have a desire to become one. The broker at one point offered a referral, to which the  new Realtor commented that she would do all the work and the broker would get the money. That is not fair.

Suddenly, at 2:35 PM, the broker called and said that she decided to call it a day; that we were free from our agreement. I asked her for something in writing, but she said that we have her word. Sure, her Realtor's word wasn't good. I called the new Realtor back, but she is not willing to work on this woman's word, especially after the phone call that she got earlier in the day. I called the broker back at 2:40 to ask if she could fax something in writing to me. I had to leave the office by 3:20, and nothing came in by that time. I have no idea what prompted the change. Maybe the other Realtor left behind a mess so large she can't cover it. Maybe she read my blog, which is linked in my signature file, or my Twitter feed and saw something documented in there that favors me. I have no idea.

On Thursday, I had to get up at 4:30 to get to the airport to catch a flight to Maine for a business trip. I asked my wife if she could take a form to the broker to get a signed statement that we were released from our listing agreement. After a day of meetings then going out to dinner with some people from my organization, I got back to my hotel room and sent my wife an email. I didn't want to call in case she was trying to get the boys to sleep. My wife emailed me the following, to which I have edited out the names:

It is good that you are having a good time.  I got yelled at from (broker) this afternoon, and she wasn’t in the office.  I have already talked with (Realtor2) and let her know what happened.  The guy that was sitting at the front desk, told me she was at a meeting all day, and he went to the back and called her on her cell, and she told me she was getting ready to board a flight and will not be in the office until Monday, but another time in the call she said she would be gone for two days.  Nobody told her that I would be coming today to have the paper signed, even though I left her two messages this morning, and her voice mail did not say she would be out of the office.  I was ticked, that I wasted my time, and my Dad’s gas to get there.  So now I have to repeat the whole process Monday.

I left her a message on Wednesday afternoon. My wife left her two messages Thursday morning. My wife said that this woman was yelling at her so loud that she held the phone with her arm all the way extended and could still here her clearly. The first Realtor told me she was a difficult woman. This I believe entirely. After my comment about "everybody hates Realtors", this broker said that she had a long list of clients who would testify otherwise. My wife and I obviously are not among that list. How the heck can you stay in business when you don't give anybody else a chance to talk and you just keep yelling at people? Maybe she's friendly to higher priced homeowners, I have no idea. I assume she makes her money somehow, but it can't be through friendly customer service.

After telling me about this woman yelling at her, I was ready to call the broker's voice mail and let her know exactly what I thought about her treating my wife like that. I decided against it. I have a bad habit of going off half-cocked, and I really am working on overcoming it. I decided on another tactic. I spent the next two hours going though my email, call log, and calendar as I began drafting a narrative of events up to that point. I detailed the significant dates, like when we listed with the Realtor, when she didn't show up for an appointment, when we had to call her broker, when she told us it was OK to list with another Realtor, everything that I had went into this. Bear in mind that I got up at 4:30 AM that morning and had a full day of travel and meetings. I was up until 11 PM working on that draft, which may work it's way to the NJ Real Estate Commission as a complaint. Maybe I'll just edit out the names and post it on this blog. Maybe I'll fine comb it for any hint of libel and post it here in case somebody is searching Google for information on any of the people or brokerages involved. I'm not sure. It helped me clear my mind and organize my thoughts, and it also stopped me from making an angry phone call late at night. When I finally finished and tried to get to sleep, I couldn't sleep for a while. I still had to get up at 5 AM on Friday.

Friday I got up, we finished the meetings, had lunch, and headed to the airport. Philly had some bad weather, so when we got to the airport around 2 PM, we found out that our 3:37 departure might not leave until after 7. Doh! We grabbed a table at the airport pub, which became our home for the next 5 hours. We made the best of a bad situation, drinking away the hours and discussing a mixture of business, family, and sea and college stories. We finally boarded the plane around 7. The pilot pulled away from the gate early, even though ATC said that our departure wasn't until 7:48. He was hoping for an earlier departure. We sat on the tarmac. I renabled the data connection on my Pocket PC and posted to Twitter and read my Google Reader feeds until we could pull onto the runway and leave. We got back to Philly about 9 PM or so. I picked up my car and was home around 10:20. The kids were asleep. My wife's sister got home, so I borrowed Grey's Anatomy season 2 and watched the first episode while I wound down. Then Doctor G Medical Examiner came on around midnight. I haven't watched that show in years, and sure enough it was a rerun that I had already seen.

Believe it or not, so far I'm enjoying the travel. I work with some really great people from a combination of offices in different locations. I'm home for the weekend, but on Monday I'm heading back down to Virginia for two days. I'm driving down. I pick up my rental car after church and I'll leave early on Monday morning for an afternoon meeting.

I sure wrote a lot about that broker. My point was, I didn't use it as an excuse to break from Weight Watchers (that came Thursday in Maine, when I was at a Mexican Irish restaurant with someone else driving and 20 oz Dos Equis.)

The look on the boys' faces when they saw me this morning was priceless. They both came over to me and climbed into bed on either side of me. I put on Jimmy Neutron for a while and enjoyed being back with them. While my wife was at Weight Watchers, we played hide and seek, until I ran out of places to hide. I can't quite get Joshua to understand that in hide and seek, you don't hide in the same place and yell "I'm in here!"

For tomorrow, our church is having a luncheon for small group leaders and Munchkin Ministry members. The kids are with my in-laws tonight. Originally kids would not be allowed, but a lot of people couldn't make it. By the time we were told that there would be room for kids, we had already made plans. We ate dinner tonight at Applebees, which has a Weight Watcher's section of the menu. The Garlic-herb chicken was awesome! Then we spent some time together and did some cleaning. Now I'm blogging and then it will be time for bed.

To be honest, I have little use for Father's Day as well. Romans 14:5 says that one man regards a day as special, and another man regards every day alike.

[5] One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.(NKJV)

I'm the man who regards every day alike. The only days I really care for are New Year's Eve and my birthday. I really only like New Year's Eve because it's an excuse to drink. Since I have kids, my birthday has gotten to be like, well, Father's Day. I get a card and some token present "from the kids."

Blogs today are a"twitter" (you can follow my Twitter feed here) with how great Mother's Day is, or how great it is to honor mothers. I guess as a son, I thought well enough of it, but as a husband, Mother's Day is just one more thing to screw up; one more standard to fail to meet, one more thing to forget, one more pain in the butt that no matter how hard I try, the day will end with me blowing something. Really, it's a day to honor mothers, but is it a day for women to stop being wives? I'm not saying that in a chauvinistic sense (at least I don't mean to), but this "Romeo will come on a white horse and give me a massage and take care of the kids and cook all day" mentality has GOT to stop. Yes, wives, we love to honor you, but we're just as human as you are. We can't read your minds.

I'm writing this entry from a very low point, although putting this text on my monitor is somehow making me feel better. Blogging and journaling can be helpful, I guess.

Here is my marital advice to anybody struggling: MEN AND WOMAN ARE DIFFERENT! Just because a husband does not parent the children using the exact same means and methods the mother does, he is not a failure, he is a man! Men and women are different. Period. We have different needs, different physiological responses, and we see the world through different eyes. That is supposed to be a beautiful thing, not a reason to fight. If both of you are the same, one of you is redundant. One of the thousands of things that it take for a marriage to work is to realize that. My wife and I fight over a lot of things that are not right or wrong, they are not good or bad, they are simply differences between us. When I'm driving, my concern is getting us to our destination safely and on time. Period. OK, I'm also concerned with not listening to crap on the radio, but that's just good multi-tasking. My wife notices every single yard sale sign or piece of trash on the curb that "might" be useful to our house. I keep telling her if she sees a yard sale, I will be more than happy to turn around unless our destination comes with a pressing need for arrival, but she usually just huffs and tells me to keep on driving. She expects me to see the yard sale signs. I love her, and will do anything for her, but God did not give me the ability to read yard sale signs while I'm driving. I only notice things I'm looking for, and I'm not looking for yard sales. She sees cheap clothes for the kids, I see more clutter to find a place to put in the house. I could see if more yard sales sold good books or electronics, but they don't so I just don't see them. That's just being me.

As I said, I have little use for Father's Day either. Sure, I get a card, and some form of present, and when we go out to eat or go to church I hear some half-assed "Happy Father's Day!" I still don't get to stop being a husband and father. I still don't get to expect my life or day to be any easier. I still find a way to screw everything up and get my wife mad at me.

That's my counter-point to all the "I live in a happy bubble where everything is perfect" Mother's Day blog entries and editorials and sermons out there. Bah, Humbug!

As I said, I'm at a point in life where I pretty much regard every day as alike. My alarm goes off (except for most Saturdays), I get up, take a shower, go to work or church or go about my business. Days do not differ from each other very much right now. My concerns are raising my children and trying to keep our heads above water. I just don't have much time or concern right now for anything else. I also get very little support. I often feel like I'm on my own. My wife expects me to make decisions, then sometimes seems to emasculate me for the decision I make. I get seemingly little useful feedback from her in which decision to make, but I have to pay when I make the wrong one. I'm sure I'm not the only man going through this at this point in time, or in any point in time, but women fail to understand that men often don't like to have to ask for help. When I get home from work in the evenings, the two prime choices I have are: help around the house or spend time with the kids. If I try to help around the house I'm accused of not spending enough time with the kids. If I spend time with the kids, I'm accused of not helping around the house. There is no way to win! There is no right answer. And as a man, and an engineer, that drives me freaking nuts.

I of course love my family. God blessed me with a wonderful wife, and two great boys, and hopefully someday we'll have at least one more. I recognize that this is a stage of life that every man has to face. Just like boot camp, it's miserable and hard, but will eventually end. That offers little comfort. Boot camp was 8 weeks in the Navy. How long will this last?

I'm sure this entry will do little for anybody reading this blog, but it's done wonders for me. Hopefully we'll get back to my usual writing soon.

I was trying to keep my kids busy by going through some picture archives on my computer, and I came across this. I wish I knew who to attribute for creating it, or even for sending it to me. Although I'm sure there is no scientific evidence backing it up, there sure is enough circumstantial evidence.