Resurrection Sunday, 2013

Sharing Some Finds

Personal stories & links to articles

  Bringing a kid with autism, or any special need, to church, can be quite challenging.
  We changed churches the day our four year old, who had been screaming

Wordless Wednesday: Lewis on Forgiveness

What Do We Know? Origin of a Nursery Rhyme

  i was looking for crafty ideas today and got diverted into nursery rhyme stuff.  Nursery rhymes had come up recently in a baby shower game, and someone mentioned that their origins were rather nasty.
  i knew that they were political and topical to the time of origin, but didn't

Wordless Wednesday: Whittington Wildlife Refuge

at Whittington Beach Park, Big Island, Hawaii

If you get an online map of the park, zoom to a scale of one mile or  less (zoom pretty tight!) you can see that these fish ponds are kinda bivalve shaped, like two attached clamshells.

Saturday Sisters: The Kitten Story

One thing we need to do as Christians is share our own faith stories. So i will begin to share some of mine, in addition to the profile/meditations on the lives of Bible women.

To kick off this new direction, i will share a humble story about a kitten. Or rather, two or three cats, and God's timing.

Wordless Wednesday: A Century of Transportation

Things i Am Known For

• If i say "Gesundheit!" i might be blessing you after a sneeze, or maybe not.  That's my word for, "Whatever.  Explain it or not; you are talking nonsense, and i don't really care."
• My book club talks about "doing a Valerie."  That's to read a book in any order that's not straight first page to last page.  i skip around radically in a book, seldom never read straight from beginning to end.  It's not uncommon that i read the last page or chapter first.
• that annoying lower-case i.
• "It's the twenty-first century."  This is a catch-all phrase for THINGS CHANGE.  Usually it's a negative - we have less privacy - but it's not all bad.  Our horizons are wider now than they used to be.  My drive to Max's school, back when, would've been a day's event or overnight stay.  Now, i can do it a couple of times, and hit other parts of the city if needed.  Whew.
• "Technology is great when it works."  'Nuff said?
• Machines misbehave around me.  Sometimes in theoretically impossible ways.  i've taken to calling it TVF (The Valerie Factor).

How You Say It

  Last week we met with our specialist about Max's Medicaid.  It was a busy day, and he handled it rather well, but what i want to talk about here is the little errand with this box of dog treats.

Learning to Correspond with School

  By the time Boom started first grade, i should've been experienced as a mom of schoolkids.
  Boom had had three years of preschool at the Y, as well as public kindergarten.  Max began preschool the year before Boom started kindergarten.
  But things are different in first grade.

Wordless Wednesday: The Things People Do To Pets

Schwa

  In school, Max has been learning sight words.  When he was younger, it was just survival words (danger, restroom), by sight.  His tutor is teaching him how to sound out words, introducing rules about when to double final letters & when not.
  And the schwa sound.
  She says it's not being taught any more.  Really?  It is a funny symbol, but very useful in sounding out words, reading dictionary entries. We were introduced to it in 2nd grade, but then it wasn't mentioned again until Intro to Linguistics in college.
  How about you?  Were you introduced to schwa in school or otherwise?  Have you found it useful?