Caleb and I just returned from a week-long work trip to Fort Collins, Colorado. He changed so much in just that one week that it was almost like playing with a whole new baby when he and Gerry were reunited last night!

• There's the tooth ... it went from a white dot the size of a period to a full-fledged, razor-sharp fang.
• There's his sitting ( Read more... )

That slow-motion, frame-by-frame tumble from the couch toward the floor... We experienced that today and my heart nearly stopped.

Caleb had just massively spit up, and since his sitting skills have been developing nicely, I propped him up in the corner of the couch where we were both sitting in order to get us cleaned up. Then I looked away for a ( Read more... )

I have always been the type of person who prays sporadically throughout the day as thoughts come to me. Structured prayer is just not something that has stuck for me. But now that I have returned to work part-time, there are multiple times a day when I sit in a quiet room and breast milk for Caleb. There is a lot of potential for these times to ( Read more... )

There is a long painting on the wall in the Biola University library, second floor, that I love. At first glance, having in mind that this is a religious school, it looks like a rendition of Jesus feeding the multitudes with a few loaves of bread and some fish. That story. And so the visitor to the library usually keeps walking after a cursory ( Read more... )

Last week when my parents were in town, we bought two rotisserie chickens at Costco and used much of the meat for an easy-to-prepare chicken cacciatore. (Chunked chicken tossed into pot to simmer along with a bottle of organic marinara sauce and an added can of sliced tomato preserves, fettuccine boiled in another pot, everything eventually tossed ( Read more... )

The church that we've become part of up here in Los Angeles is technically affiliated with the Conservative Baptist denomination, but you would never know it from observation. There is so much "realness" to the people and the programs and the services ... I guess "authenticity" might be a better word, just that sometimes it gets overused. Meh. Well ( Read more... )

Words from an Internet stranger that resonated with me this morning:


( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Seems like yesterday was just meant to be a dramatic commute... In the morning, there was a car crash just behind me as I was walking the final block to the office, and in the evening at the Metrolink station, a 4-year-old nearly got himself run over by an arriving train. Kudos to the Middle Eastern man standing next to me who acted without ( Read more... )

I'm a fan of documentaries, human interest and psychology pieces, and how-it's-made sort of films. So when somebody linked me to the Russian-hosted Best Documentaries blog, I was in bliss! Shortly after, I discovered the @Google YouTube series, and found myself watching and listening often. In 2008, I started tracking my viewership of these things ( Read more... )