Show and Tell Friday

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Barbara Harper

Kelli at There’s No Place Like Home hosts the “Show and Tell Friday,” asking “Do you have a something special to share with us? It could be a trinket from grade school, a piece of jewelry, an antique find. Your show and tell can be old or new. Use your imagination and dig through those old boxes in your closet if you have to! Feel free to share pictures and if there’s a story behind your special something, that’s even better! If you would like to join in, all you have to do is post your “Show and Tell” on your blog, copy the post link, come over here and add it to Mr. Linky.“

Those who come by for the Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt will have seen this back in April, but I wanted to “show” and “tell” about it today, too.

I made this when I was expecting my first son 23 years ago. It was from a kit, and it is one of my favorite things I have ever stitched.

Here is a close-up of the detail I love about this piece. I don’t know if it will show up well, but the little iced cookies are raised and the little cupcakes have french knot icing. I love the stitching for the grass and fringe on the blanket as well.

I like it because it has bears on it; I like it because of their expressions; I like the detail; I like it because it is cute; I like it because I made it for my children; I like it because it is one of the few pieces I’ve stitched that I still have — most things I’ve made were for gifts and were given away.

I don’t know if I will give it to one of my sons when they have children (if they want it) or if I will keep it and use it in a room for grandkids. If they live nearby I’ll probably have a room where they can keep toys and take naps. Until then, it’s tucked away in a closet.

Flag Day

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Barbara Harper

Our Duty to Our Flag

by Edgar Guest

Less hate and greed
Is what we need
And more of service true;
More men to love
The flag above
And keep it first in view.

Less boast and brag
About the flag,
More faith in what it means;
More heads erect,
More self-respect,
Less talk of war machines.

The time to fight
To keep it bright
Is not along the way,
Nor ‘cross the foam,
But here at home
Within ourselves today.

‘Tis we must love
That flag above
With all our might and main;
For from our hands,
Not distant lands,
Shall come dishonor’s stain.

If that flag be
Dishonored, we
Have done it, not the foe;
If it shall fall
We first of all
Shall be to strike a blow.

(Graphic courtesy of Home Sweet Home Graphics)

Booking Through Thursday: Dessert First

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Barbara Harper

The Booking Through Thursday question for this week is:

Do you cheat and peek ahead at the end of your books? Or do you resolutely read in sequence, as the author intended?
And, if you don’t peek, do you ever feel tempted?

I used to look at the end in my undisciplined youth. 🙂 But I found that actually spoiled the story for me. Part of the enjoyment is the unfolding of the story itself, the anticipation, the guessing of what’s going to happen.

I had a similar experience with Christmas presents when I was a child. I was playing near the Christmas tree when I realized that some of the wrapping paper on the presents was light enough to see through. I came back later when no one was around and investigated and made out what most of my presents were. I was delighted! Until Christmas morning when there were no surprises left. Then I was bereft and deflated. I never again yielded to the temptation to find out what my presents were ahead of time.

I’ve come to love savoring the story, not just finding out the ending — unless it is a really boring book. There are times when I am reading through kind of a dull part of a book that I’ll skim through the next few pages and see where it’s going, and I’ll usually come back and finish the dull part before going further. But I do like the save the end for the the last thing.

Father’s Day Quotes

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Barbara Harper

1. To be popular at home is a great achievement. The man who is loved by the house cat, by the dog, by the neighbor’s children, and by his own wife, is a great man, even if he has never had his name in Who’s Who. ~ Thomas Dreier

2. “A man’s children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season.” ~Author Unknown

3. “A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be.” ~ Author Unknown

4. “None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world-so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.”
~ Victoria, Queen of England

5. “It is a wise father that knows his own child.” ~ William Shakespeare

6. He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care. ~ William Penn

7. A father is someone you look up to, no matter how tall you grow.

8. Fathers are people who give their daughters away to other men who aren’t nearly good enough so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than any body’s.

9. The father will be too small or too busy to interest the big boy if he counts himself too big or too busy to be interested in the little boy. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

10. “By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father.” ~ General Douglas MacArthur

11.“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” George Herbert

12. By the time a man realizes that his father was usually right, he has a son who thinks he’s usually wrong.

13. If you want your child to talk to you when he is 15, listen to him when he is 5.

Stray thoughts

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Barbara Harper

This is the first time in months, ever since I first started participating in Works for Me Wednesday, that I haven’t shared a tip. I have a couple in the back of my mind but need to just let them incubate for a while.

The Ladies’ Luncheon is this week. :0 Things are coming along, but there’s lots of little stuff to do, loose ends to take care of. I’m finding summer is not the best month to do this — so many people are out of town. I just keep having to give the whole thing to the Lord — attendance, details, etc. I tend to have this underlying nervous feeling when things like this come up, even if everything is going well — would appreciate your prayers for a calm heart (and mind and body…) Yes, I am meditating on Phil. 4:6-8 often.

Thank you for your well wishes with my cold last week. Though I was initially dismayed to be sick with so much to do, really last week was a better time to be sick than the week before or this week. And though I had intended to get a lot done with Jesse away at camp, I was able to really rest with the quietness and knowing he was being taken care of and not being neglected in another room. And I was able to get a few things crossed off my list even with that. The “brain fog” started to lift about Friday and the energy level started returning — that helped a lot! This cold seems to come with a lingering cough — Jim and Jesse are still coughing. I’ve had a little bit of a cough but I’m still having to blow my nose a bunch even though overall I feel a lot better.

One odd thing happened though — one day when I was blowing my nose, I all of a sudden felt extremely dizzy — had to grab the door frame because otherwise I was going to fall. It only lasted a few seconds, but then my right ear felt like it was blocked, like it does when I fly, even though I could still hear out of it (odd, since the left sinus has been the worst). That feeling went away after a while, but sometimes when I blow my nose, there are squeaky sounds in my right ear.

The visit with the new doctor went well. It took two hours just to get back to the exam room, though. I hope that’s not normal. She seems maybe just a little bit flighty — forgot to give me the prescription she wrote out but thought she had given to me when I asked about it, then she found it, then, when I got home I saw it was for the wrong dosage. I still have to call back and get that corrected. But I liked her overall and felt that I could communicate with her. That’s probably the biggest criteria I have for a doctor — that we communicate well and that they are willing to listen and discuss things with me. In the past I have had a well-known, much recommended Christian doctor have his hand I the doorknob the whole time he talked with me, like he really needed to go. I knew he had a waiting room full of people, but I had been waiting a long time and was paying good money for that 10 minutes of his time! He also tended to resent it if I asked questions. I like to be an informed patient. I don’t really go to a doctor just to get a prescription (my dad was that kind of patient — “I don’t want to hear all about it, just fix it.”) I like to understand what is going on and I don’t like to take medicine.

When this new doctor started with, “Tell me your story” and then asked questions along the way, I felt we would indeed have good lines of communication.

Everything was ok with all the blood work (cholesterol is only 168!) except for one odd thing I had never heard of before. The lab tests listed my “EO” (whatever that is) as 15.9H %, and normal is 0.9-2.9. She said in 30 years of practice she had never seen it that high in anyone and said it indicated either I was very allergic to something or had a parasite picked up from animals. She asked a lot about the cold, but it was definitely a cold and not allergies. I’m not having any symptoms of either of those problems, so she wasn’t sure what to make of it. I’m supposed to go back in a month. The lab test results page says this suggests “eosinophilia” — this was the only word I had trouble understanding with her accent but I am sure it was because I had never heard of it before. I looked it up online — and you have to be careful about that because they always have to give the worst case scenario and can scare you to death — but I still don’t know what to make of it. We do have a dog, but she’s mostly outside. She comes in at night and stays in one room. I don’t feed her or really do much with her besides occasionally petting her and washing her blanket that she uses indoors. I have seasonal allergies in the spring and am allergic to a couple of medicines, but haven’t been exposed to those. So I don’t know what to make of it, but I am not going to worry about it. We’ll see if it is the same when I go back next month. She also said I have a bit of a heart murmur — I had never been told that, either.

Well, this was just going to be a short note, but I have rambled on. Better go get some things done! Hope you have a great day.

A few poems for Father’s Day

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Barbara Harper

FATHER

Out in the morning Father goes,
Whether it pours with rain or snows,
Whether the wild wind beats and blows:–
By the fire sit Mother and I
Doing our lessons quietly.
Back in the twilight Father comes,
When I’ve finished with books and sums.
Not all the noise of all the drums
Is a jollier noise, I know,
Than Father when he says, “Hallo!”

~Author Unknown~

Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young,
Who loved thee so fondly as he?
He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue,
And joined in thy innocent glee.
~ Margaret Courtney

Two Prayers

Last night my little boy confessed to me
Some childish wrong;
And kneeling at my knee
He prayed with tears–
Dear God, make me a man
Like Daddy–wise and strong;
I know you can.
Then while he slept
I knelt beside his bed,
Confessed my sins,
And prayed with low-bowed head.
O God, make me a child
Like my child here–
Pure, guileless,
Trusting Thee with faith sincere.

~ Andrew Gillies

(The beautiful graphics are courtesy of Snapshots of Joy.)

Time Travel Tuesday: Vacation Memories

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Barbara Harper

The topic for this week’s Time Travel Tuesday, created and hosted by My Life as Annie, is “Vacation Memories.” Annie asks:

We are traveling back (in our minds) to vacations… either a favorite one, or most memorable.
Do you have any special vacation memories? Where did you go? Did you camp out, or stay in a hotel?

Some of you who read here regularly will have seen a little of this in a childhood meme a few weeks ago.

I don’t remember that we actually went on vacations except to visit relatives. I don’t remember going to amusements parks as a family: my first memory of a hotel was during my high school senior trip.

When we did visit relatives, we usually went to see my father’s mother and brother who lived in LA (we lived “next door” in TX). The thing I loved about that particular uncle was that, of his 5 kids, 3 were girls close to my age and all of our birthday were in August. One was a year older than me, one was the same age I was, and the other was a year younger. I remember once we celebrated all of our birthdays at once with a big party complete with relay games. I think that was the first time I ever had a big party like that.

My father’s mother, affectionately nicknamed Nannie, had children in TX, LA, and AL and she would drive around to visit them all. We used to call her the Galloping Grandma. 🙂 There were a few times she took me with her, and I enjoyed traveling with her.

Other than that, if we went anywhere it was to the beach. I grew up in Corpus Christi, TX, and we made multitudes of excursions to Padre Island. Camp-outs, cookouts, birthday parties — a lot of that kind of thing happened there, besides just regular Saturdays at the beach. We moved from there when I was 13, and I had forgotten how much I missed it until we want back for a family reunion when I was in my early 30s.

Since being married and having kids, one of my favorite vacations was to Charleston, SC. Our kids’ Christian school’s Easter break was a different week than the public schools’ spring break (I wish it was like that ever year!!), so we didn’t encounter all kinds of other families on break. Our pastor used to live in Charleston, so we asked him about places to see and stay. He told us about a hotel right on one of the beaches. It was a little more expensive but oh-so-worth it to be able to go down to the beach any time (and going to sleep with the sound of the surf was nice). We do have modesty concerns and don’t want to go to beaches with the kinds of things people wear — especially with 3 boys — so having that area of beach almost to ourselves for a few days was wonderful. Plus we went on one of the carriage tours (only marred by someone behind us chatting on her cell phone so we couldn’t always hear the guide clearly. Grr!) and visited the Yorktown and went on a harbor tour. It was one of the loveliest vacations ever.

Another time we went down to Clearwater, FL, because my oldest son was interested in Clearwater Christian College, and we took an extra day and went to Sea World. I just loved that, especially the dolphin show.

My husband has often said that all he remembers about family vacations as a child is driving and driving and driving and then having to sit around and listen to adults talk. 🙂 Though that is a part of vacations (and we do want the kids to value getting to know their relatives and not just think vacations are all about their entertainment), we have tried to have a few family excursions like the ones to Charleston or taken an extra day here and there just to do something as a family. Even when we have gone to visit relatives, we’ve tried to take a day or afternoon to see some sights. We used to camp a lot when the two older boys were younger.

Whatever we do, it is just nice to break from routine and spend some time together apart from the usual distractions and duties.

A present! For me!

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Barbara Harper

I got a note from Everyday Mommy this morning saying she had felt a little inspiration and made a blog header for me. Wow, I was so surprised!

I wasn’t sure if I could use it because WordPress only allows a little bit of customization on its free blogs. When I first uploaded it, it came through beautifully, but the words from WordPress’s theme were still over the top. Then I remembered Owlhaven also used WordPress and had a cute design from Everyday Mommy, so I went over to see what theme she used, made the switch — and it came out beautifully! (Thanks, Owlhaven, for inadvertently helping. 🙂 I was going to e-mail you, then realized I could just scroll down and see what theme you used.)

I love it. It is very much “me.” It’s so nice to have my blog a little more personalized. Thank you, Everyday Mommy!

Fathers and sons, good and bad

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Barbara Harper

In light of Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, I will be posting several things relating to fathers from my files throughout this week.

The following is from Keep a Quiet Heart by Elisabeth Elliot, published by Vine Books in 1995.

While visiting [a] Bible College in South Carolina, I found in the library a little book called Father and Son, written by my grandfather, Philip E. Howard. He writes:

“Do you remember that encouraging word of Thomas Fuller’s, a chaplain of Oliver Cromwell’s time? It’s a good passage for a father in all humility and gratitude to tuck away in his memory treasures:

“’Lord, I find the genealogy of my Savior strangely checkered with four remarkable changes in four immediate generations.

Rehoboam begat Abijah; that is, a bad father begat a bad son.
Abijah begat Asa; that is, a bad father begat a good son.
Asa begat Jehoshaphat; that is, a good father begat a good son.
Jehoshaphat begat Joram; that is, a good father begat a bad son.

I see, Lord, from hence that my father’s piety cannot be entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see also that actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son.’”

My blogging story

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Barbara Harper

Chilihead at Don’t Try This At Home is sponsoring an opportunity for bloggers to tell about how and why they got started blogging. She has a “Mr. Linky” up so folks can post the link back to their own blogging story.

She asks these questions:

How did you start blogging?

I think I first starting noticing blogs through a couple of Christian message forums where people would link to their personal blogs in their posts. When I first heard of blogging, I think I thought it was kind of weird to write personal thoughts out for all the world to see. 🙂 But as I began to discover more and more, I found some really enlightening thoughts, some devotional, some funny, some instructive. As I found blogs I liked, I’d look at other blogs on their blogroll — it’s easy to get hooked. 🙂 I began to think about starting my own, then finally got my oldest son (my in-house computer consultant) to help me set it up. That was almost a year ago.

Did you intend to be a blog w/a following? If so, how did you go about it?

Well — that question feels a little awkward to me. I think of celebrities as people with a following, and I didn’t set out to be a celebrity. And I’m not one 🙂 And I don’t know if I have a “following.” But writing of any type is a form of communication, and it’s nice to know that you have indeed communicated something, that someone is reading, even nicer when someone responds.

I think you get more readers by getting “out there” — reading and commenting on other blogs (though the sole reason for doing that shouldn’t be just to get noticed or get readers; rather it should be genuine comments on the person’s post), joining the Family Friendly blogroll, participating in some of the weekly interactive memes.

What do you hope to achieve or accomplish with your blog? Have you been successful? If not, do you have a plan to achieve those goals?

I’ve mentioned this before on a meme or two about blogging, but I want first of all to be used of the Lord. I want to share His truth and encourage people to read and heed His Word and get to know Him better. I want to be an encouragement to other women. I want to be able to be a help and testimony to people with transverse myelitis and other trials. I want to improve my writing by writing. I want to have fun. 🙂 I think I have accomplished a little in all those areas and hope to continue to.

Has the focus of your blog changed since you started blogging? How?

I don’t know if I have really had a focus besides just posting my “stray thoughts,” and I’ve pondered whether I should have a more specific focus. Some blogs are wonderfully humorous, even when making poignant points; some are deeply devotional. I’m kind of a hodgepodge.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started?

Well, it takes a while to learn how to make links, post pictures, embed vidoes, etc. It’s all kind of overwhelming at first, but I’ve learned along the way.

Do you make money with your blog?

No. I feel honored that anyone would come by to read anything I have to say. I would feel strange trying to make money off my readers just for coming by and reading. But I have read different perspectives on this, and I have come to understand there are many valid reasons for making money from a blog. I don’t feel I should do so just now, though I might change my mind in the future. If I ever change to a paid blog host (this one is free) I might need to do something like ads to pay for it.

I think if I wanted to try and make money online, I think I’d go to a website rather than a blog and make a business of it.

Does your immediate or extended family know about your blog? If so, do they read it? If not, why?

I sent an e-mail to family members who have e-mail and mentioned it on on Christmas letter, but that’s all I’ll do. I don’t want to push it or seem self-promotional. My husband reads it occasionally and I think my two oldest sons check it out sometimes, but if anyone else reads it, they haven’t let me know.

What two pieces of advice would you give to a new blogger?

1) Be natural: don’t try to copy someone else’s style. Just be yourself.

And 2) Keep it in perspective. It’s too easy to let it take too much of your day and energy. Don’t let blogging about life get in the way of actually living.

Chilihead didn’t ask this question, but I am adding it for myself and anyone else who’d like to answer it:

Have you encountered any surprises in blogging?

I knew there was a “blogging community” but I didn’t realize how much fun it would be to be a part of it. I’ve enjoyed the friends I have made “out there” and I have been amazed at how bloggers can come together to pray someone through something or even contribute monetarily to help a fellow blogger through a serious need.

Overall I have very much enjoyed my almost-year of blogging!

(Do leave a comment and let me know you stopped by! 🙂 )