chim chim cher-oo

During the months before school opened its doors and released its children to sunshine and sunscreen, the search for cool amusement gave way to the hopeless nurturing of spring fever cases. The virus began spreading like Silly Bandz throughout local elementary school, and all hopes for its containment vanished as the Houston-heat grew Houston-hotter. Thoroughly ignorant of the contagious nature of the disease, little boys stuck their heads out of backseat car windows and opened their mouths, contaminating carpool lines as they belted out Lady Gaga’s “Ale(-Ale-Ale-)jandro.” The fever passed through families, and children sought shelter in their neighbor’s homes, irrationally afraid of visiting grandparents.

This kind of irrational behavior became a common symptom among the infected. Upon exposure to the disease, one nine year old admitted a severe craving for fish oil supplements. After placing a capsule under his tongue, he immediately expressed a need to retrieve an item left right outside of his home. However, the record shows that the child walked beyond his backyard gate, across his driveway, and under a tree before attempting to swallow. He then fell, knees to the earth, and began to dig a small hole. At this time, the vitamin was projected from the child’s mouth into the hole, covered with dirt, and marked with a dying daffodil. The child returned to the house empty-handed, refused to comment on the incident, and never acknowledged the four large kitchen windows which bore witness to the entire event.

On a similar evening, a game began in the traditional way: laughter could be heard throughout a cul-de-sac as eight children ran to hide. However, no one is certain what happened between the counts of one and one hundred; a rash onset of the fever is suspected. The filed episode reported that when the seeker, Kid 1, opened his eyes and cried out, “Ready or not…,” he also found Kid 2 standing in front of him, hands over his eyes. Kids 3, 4, and 5 were lying flat, squished together like sardines, in the bed of a truck parked in front of a nearby house. As Kid 1 looked for the rest of his hidden friends, Kid 6 left his spot behind a tree to chase a squirrel. He picked up a soccer ball and threw it in the squirrel’s path. The ball smacked the hood of the truck and set off an alarm which was later reported several streets over. Kids 3, 4, and 5 sat up in confusion. Kid 7 was startled by the noise and stood up from behind the trashcan where he was hiding on the other side of the street. His sudden movements knocked the trashcan over and sent it rolling down the driveway. When it reached the bottom of the driveway, Kid 8 (litter-ally) rolled out of the trashcan.

Neighborhoods who experienced the epidemic also reported unnatural amounts of string cheese consumption, several occasions where backyard swing sets were turned into water parks, and a couple of disillusioned victims changing the words of “La Cucaracha” to “Ra Mochalaba.”

Vaccinations have not been created, but studies have found that several months of vacation between the months of May and August aid even the most severe cases. The start of school in August has been shown to encourage the reappearing of minor symptoms, but all traces of these particular instances have disappeared at the arrival of football season, pumpkin spice lattes, winds in the east, and mist coming in.

"Can't put me finger on what lies in store, but I fear what's to happen all happened before."

make me Thy fuel

"From prayer that asks that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, O Captain, free
Thy soldier who would follow Thee.

From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified)
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.

Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay,
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire;
Let me not sink to be a clod;
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God."

- Amy Carmichael, Mountain Breezes

the ideal woman

"Here we have a picture of God's ideal woman... Faith in God that sees beyond present bitter setbacks. Freedom from the securities and comforts of the world. Courage to venture into the unknown and the strange. Radical commitment in the relationships appointed by God.... This is the woman of Proverbs 31:25 who looks into the future with confidence in God and laughs at the coming troubles: 'Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.' Ruth is one of 'the holy women who hoped in God... [and did] not fear anything that is frightening' (1 Peter 3:5-6). It is a beautiful thing to watch a woman like this serve Christ with courage…. Whatever else the great women of faith doubted, they never doubted that God governed every part of their lives and that nothing could stay his hand... Nothing - from toothpicks to tyrants - is ultimately self-determining. Everything serves (willingly or not) the 'purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will' (Eph. 1:11). God is the all-encompassing, all-pervading, all-governing reality."

-John Piper, A Sweet and Bitter Providence

(originally posted on the Girl Talk blog)

our first game is called 'well begun is half done'

Yes, it’s true, and I'm sorry: this blog has been without babysitting-esque stories lately.

Yesterday around noon, the phone rang at the exact moment a few blonde hairs appeared below the kitchen window. I ran the phone outside as C2 hopped from one rock to the next along the edge of the flower bed and then plopped down in the mud. He tucked the phone under his ear and began to dig.

“Hello, sir? … No, sir. … What am I doing? … Oh, I’m planting a sunflower, sir.”

C2 passed the phone back to me and continued to poke at the dirt and make room for the plant he uprooted (ahem) from the creek in his neighborhood. He stuck the long roots into the bottom of the mini-pit and shoved gravel around its perimeter to help it stand. The length of the flower made its head unusually top-heavy, but the core remained firm. C2 stood up and shook his head, dirt flying everywhere, and marched back into the air conditioning.

An hour later, we walked back outside, and he paused to check on his prized plant. The top fourth of the sunflower drooped toward the earth. As my little gardener crawled to examine it, I asked him what he thought the problem was. He lunged for the hose to rehydrate the flower and then stopped and looked up at me.

“I don't know. Maybe it’s in shock.”

He nodded then knelt back down to tend to his project.

So, why has my blog lacked Nanny Diaries' posts? I don't know. Maybe it’s in shock.

peter pan nightmare

Mick LaSalle, film writer for the Houston Chronicle, wrote an article about the perception of age as portrayed by actors in movies of today compared with those of yesteryear. If you read a hard copy of the paper, you might have skipped past this easy-to-miss piece on the back page of the entertainment section. LaSalle begins with commentary on modern movie releases and ends with a hard critique of our culture.

(Is his analysis correct? Read the article in its entirety.)

LaSalle begins by saying, "We're seeing this more and more in movies, not actors playing younger than they are but rather actors playing their age — middle age — as a time for beginnings. Look at the Sex and the City women, who are in their 40s and 50s playing women in their 40s and 50s, yet their whole atmosphere is young, and their whole story is one of constant renewal. There's no sense of settling down or turning from the world." He goes on to explain why for certain reasons this is due to perception: Baby Boomers and Generation Xers set the cultural agenda; and then he shows that for other reasons, this goes beyond perception: modern stars tend to take better care of themselves.

LaSalle then moves on to his final, and most important reason:

"There's a refusal to get old — to some degree it's a refusal to become mature — that's just part of our culture. . . . Adulthood just isn't what it used to be."

"In fact, when I see movies like Sherlock Holmes or The Losers, I wonder if we're not lost in some Peter Pan nightmare, in which adult characters can behave like children and yet no one seems to notice.

"Let's be fair to the past. Gardner may have been practically an old woman at 41. But in The Killers, at 23, she was more of an adult than most of our current actresses will ever be. Gable may have been an old fat guy at 47, but at 31, in Red Dust (1932), he was a man. Not a young man. A man. He was a year younger than Ashton Kutcher is today.

"Kirsten Dunst is 28 — the same age as Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) — and yet she's still an ingenue. At 32, Hilary Swank tried to act the femme fatale in The Black Dahlia (2006) but seemed like a girl playing dress-up. Meanwhile, Jane Greer — perhaps the sexiest, slinkiest and scariest film noir heroine of them all — was only 22 when she filmed Out of the Past (1947). And Jean Harlow was only 26 when she died. She was a woman from her first appearance onscreen.

"Perhaps it takes a Depression or a World War II to put miles on people's spirits and make them seem older. By comparison, later boomers and Generation Xers have lived their lives in unchallenging times. I'm not complaining — that's a good thing — who needs calamity? Who needs to feel or act old a minute before it's necessary?

"Yet I wonder: Maybe we're seeing in our buoyant, middle-aged stars a representation of our own consciousness — the unclouded consciousness of a people who have evaded life's deepest and most meaningful lessons.

"That would even be worse than aging, to go through life and miss the point."