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We’ve realized that our daughter has got this bedtime thing figured out. Bedtime is to be avoided. Anything that looks suspicously like preparations for bedtime is to be avoided. Pajamas are definitely to be avoided, as is Mommy, generally, since Mommy has been known to scoop her up and hustle her off to bed. She still thinks Daddy is the safer choice, but she’s discovering that Daddy is beginning to be just as suspect.

The parenting guideline for bedtime used to be that when Cora would get snuggly, that she was ready to be rocked and put to bed. She’d consistently snuggle in somewhere around 8:00, and then Mommy and Daddy would have the evening to themselves. As Cora’s gotten older, she’s become less interested in snuggling, and more interested in cramming every last bit of playtime possible into the day. Rather than snuggle, she dances out of reach, spinning herself into a frenzy of activity designed, we think, to keep her going out of sheer momentum. 8:00 slides past, and then 9:00, and then 10:00 – and still Cora will keep going. Momm’s ready to drop, but Cora will keep going.

And so we’ve discovered that we can’t rely on the signs from Cora to determine when she goes to bed. We have to impose our own bounds on her, partly for her benefit and partly for our parental sanity. We need time to be adults, to be adults not on toddler duty from the time she wakes up in the morning till past the time we ourselves ought to be in bed in the evening.

I bet we’ll discover lots of things like that, where parental guidelines have to be imposed, either for her sake or for ours. The thing’ll be figuring out just where those boundaries are, and why we’ve created them – to know when they’re of necessity hard and fast, and when they can be flexible. Letting her run free is no way to raise a kid – she’ll have no concept of how to fit in the world. But putting her in an iron box won’t help either – she wasn’t created to be a little automaton. Granted, those bounds and bonds will stretch as she can do more, knows more, understands more. We’ll need to figure out her place in the world, just as she is, and the challenge will be for us to keep in synch. We won’t manage it perfectly – sometimes we’ll be ahead of the curve, and sometimes she will. But for now, I’ll trundle her off to bed when we deem it necessary. And feel grateful that as yet she’s still a toddler, so our hardest decisions are bedtimes and mealtimes, what toys are appropriate and how much is too much, and when a minor illness warrants a trip to the pediatrician rather than just a big dose of love with a little dose of Children’s Tylenol.

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A thunderstorm rendered our power system kaput last night. Sometime between 7 and 8 pm, the lights went out, and as of this morning, they still hadn’t come back on. Our usual evening activities – reading, fiddling on the computer, watching a DVD with our daughter, seeing Leno/Jon Stewart/whatever else my husband surfs across – all were knocked out of commission by the lack of juice. The game of the evening was to avoid stepping on a cat in the dark. Getting ready for work this morning was fun, too – doing one’s hair and makeup by candlelight, you tend to use a very light hand, for fear of looking like this.

All in all, assuming that the power’s back on when we get home this evening, a relatively low impact event. We got a little bit of extra sleep (not much else to do), but otherwise, other than needing to replace some food in the fridge/freezer, all it did was convince us that we need to be better prepared should something like this happen again. We had the one flashlight at the ready, but one flashlight for three people isn’t very useful. Better to have some money on hand, in case our outage were more widespread than just our little neck of the woods. Supply of bottled water would also be good to have in stock. But candles were easily found, there’s plenty of canned food in the pantry, and our stove is gas (though uses electric to spark the gas – a candle lighter works just fine in a pinch) – we weren’t going to starve. Die of boredom- maybe. Die of starvation – nah.

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Testing ‘new’ functionality… If you hit refresh on this site, it should try to write a cookie to your machine (if you have cookies enabled) that’ll keep track of when you last visited here. The next time you visit here, any entries that have been written since your last visit will have the text (New) before their title. Eventually, I’d like to mark which categories have new stuff, etc, etc, but we’ll start with small steps. Note that this particular entry has a post-dated date of authorship, just so that folks who visit in the next couple of days will see something New, whether or not I post anything else…

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National Public Radio had an interview with Weird Al Yankovic this morning. (Info and replay available on NPR’s site.) Made me stop in my morning routine to take a listen. Even better, this evening I got a chance to hear the EXTENDED version of the interview. Beats listening to the BEA webinar that I tried to connect to – luckily for me, their webinar presenter’s site was down, and I got to hear Weird Al instead.

True confessions: Weird Al’s music was the stuff I can first recall singing out loud while listening to my Walkman in the 80’s. I snatched up each cassette as they came out, and had the great luck in college to get to go a Weird Al concert. At one point, an ex-boyfriend gave me the boxed set of Weird Al, knowing that this was the way to win my heart.

I’ve since given away my boxed set to a young friend who’s captivated by Weird Al’s music, and had decided to pass up his latest release (Poodle Hat) because I was too grown up to buy a Weird Al CD. (Note that I do own Running with Scissors, released in 1999, so this a fairly recent “maturity”.) Hearing him on the radio this morning, and checking out the info on Amazon for it, I think I’m going to have to dive back into my childhood spirit and snag Poodle Hat. Maybe even a Weird Al t-shirt… think I like the anime one best…

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Folks who’ve had to live with me know that I’m not a particularly neat person. I attribute it to just always juggling too many things – a clean home ranks among the priorities, but it’s handled in amongst all of the other things that vie for my time and attention. It bothers me when I stop and look around my house and see things that need attention, but my times to stop are few, and the times when I actually have a moment to do something about it seem even fewer. I’ve often been tempted to hire professionals to come in and do it for me, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. One, I’d be embarassed to have someone else clean my house. Two, it feels like cheating, like I somehow can’t handle the own mess that I make. But, boy, does it seem like a losing battle, this housework stuff. The best I ever seem to do is to keep a reasonably low level of clutter (reasonably low varying depending on my particular time to pick up vs. clutter tolerance level balance), and then rotate through areas of the house, making each one individually at least cleaner than it was. The whole house never seems to be clean at once, and that’s not even counting tackling the basement. It’s not as if we have a large house, either- in fact, I’m fairly well convinced that I never want a large house, just because then the cleaning problem would expand with the increased square footage.

Tomorrow’s task list looms large, even without the household cleaning chores. The lawn needs mowed, and we need to get a new lawn mower because the old one’s decided it’s time to retire. The nursery needs its paint job to be completed. Milk’s mostly gone, so we need to do a grocery run, and heck, might as well do the weekly shopping if you’ve got to wander in the grocery store for something else. And that’s before the vacuuming, dusting, bathroom cleaning, and floor mopping that ought to happen, too. Even if we didn’t aim to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, there’s really no room for chore spillage there, as we have duties at church, and it’ll be Jason’s birthday, so we’ll have cake/ice cream/fancy lunch. Monday it’s back to work, with an hour or so available in the evening after Cora’s gone to bed.

How did folks ever do this before time-saving devices like dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuums??? When women had six or seven children running around, how’d they then have time to tidy up the place and make the dinner? Granted, they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so no bathrooms to scrub, but I’m not ready to retreat to a little shack in the backyard with a half-moon cut out in the door. (Is that where we get the idea of mooning someone, I wonder?)

Just my rant for the evening, I guess… spent a bit of time attacking the kitchen, but feel like someone else walking in would notice what’s _not_ been done, whereas I’m the only one who notices that, gee, it looks a lot better! Pretty depressing…

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Occasionally, I look over my list of recent entries, and the categories to which they’re assigned. Basically, that gives me an idea of what I’ve been thinking/writing about of late, and usually highlights for me any imbalances on where I’m spending my cranial cycles. Looking down over the list, you’d get the impression that my ‘Christianity’ category thinking has been sorely lacking. Truth is, the thinking’s been there, just not the writing.

I’ve been reading a book called “Lifestyle Evangelism” that I checked out of our church’s resource center. Its basic premise is that the idea of evangelism being a spiel you give some stranger about the importance of Christ in their life is completely wrong. Not only is it the wrong approach, in terms of effectiveness (I’m not a big fan of folks cold-calling me for relatively minor decisions like swapping my mortgage – big life decisions like where to put your faith and trust just don’t belong in a cold-call kind of setting), it’s not really the truest form of evangelism. Dr. Aldrich’s position is that evangelism is really an outpouring of our lives as they reflect Christ’s impact on us. Our evangelistic outreach really comes as we reach to folks in their ordinary, world-weary situations, and come to know them and their concerns, and then are able to come alongside of them to show how Christ can impact them, in their day-to-day travails.

In other words, we’re to live with, interact with, and minister to folks in their specific situations – whether that be a homeless person seeking their next meal, or the guy who seems to have it all in the corner office. There’s not a blanket answer or cold-call patter. The cold-call patter approach is actually directly against the vein of “Love one another” – there’s little love for an individual expressed in a rehearsed script repeated ad infinitum to spiritual “targets”.

Examining our first case, our theoretical homeless person has physical needs that Christ has promised to meet; in the second case, our theoretical executive may have a need for meaning in their life, or a sense of peace and balance, or a need for a loving marriage, or… To help our theoretical executive, the answer isn’t as simple as going down to the soup kitchen to make a hot meal. His or her kinds of needs are typically hidden away, seen only by folks who’ve taken the time to form a relationship.

The book’s been very interesting, in showing the qualities necessary in a believer for lifestyle evangelism, and the qualities necessary in a church that’s interested in developing lifestyle evangelistic believers. Both encouraging and challenging, especially as I poke at it for myself personally, and try to figure out how it would apply to, say, kids – both my own and the kids I come into contact with via Sunday school or via Pioneer Girls.

Anyway, culling my thoughts here seems to clarify them a bit for me, although may cause me to muddle them for everyone else… if you have any comments or want to discuss this stuff, bounce me an email or drop something in the comments for this entry.

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Hey, I won a copy of ‘Bitter EJB’ from JavaRanch! They regularly have book giveaways where the authors of a given book answer questions in a forum related to that book. Folks are entered into the contest by posting something in the forum that week. As I’ve been working on learning EJBs, and specifically how to do something with them using BEA’s app server, I answered a guy’s question (my wonderful answer here), just basically to test out how well I was learning my stuff. Turns out my post got randomly selected as someone who was going to get a book! And I’d been drooling over that book, anyway, so this just made my day!

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I had intended to get some work done this evening… writing a document or two explaining the benefits of doing this or that. But I discovered that I can’t get to my email from work, that the system seems to be down. And I imagine I can only thank the Blaster virus we’re hearing so much about of late. So, thank you, Blaster. You’ve allowed me to enjoy a James Bond movie this evening, rather than sneaking in a few hours of work on a Friday evening. Rather than “Die Another Day”, I’ll “Work Another Day”.

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Most kids go to bed holding their teddy bears, or their favorite blankies. My kid went to bed tonight clutching her sandals.

We’ve known she’s got a thing for shoes. While she’s still in her pajamas, it’s not uncommon for her to come to us with one of her pairs of shoes, demanding that they be put on. If we stay in bed too long, she’ll often flop our shoes up on the bed at us. And often the first thing she does at grandma’s house in the morning is to go get grandma’s sandals and bring them back to her. You can even catch her in some of the new pictures in the gallery, walking around in her daddy’s shoes.

We think the shoe thing has to do with being able to go outside. Since she often hears “Wait, Mommy and Daddy need to put their shoes on”, she preempts the delay by bringing shoes to us and making sure that she’s also appropriately shod. I just don’t know where she thinks she’s going sleep-walking tonight…